Yesterday, I did a fresh install of OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my NVidia-powered machine (GeForce GTX 1060 6gb). When installing, I enabled Secure Boot.
By default, the distribution comes with nouveau drivers, and the process of installing official NVidia drivers is outlined here: https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers
I successfully added openSUSE-repos-Tumbleweed-NVIDIA as per the guide; first oddity is that by default it shipped with openSUSE-repos-MicroOS-NVIDIA, which got uninstalled as a conflicting package, despite this being Tumbleweed. (I later tried to rollback and do these steps with openSUSE-repos-MicroOS-NVIDIA installed instead, to no avail)
Next, as per the guide, I tried to do zypper install-new-recommends. After installation, I rebooted the machine. Upon login, resolution was forced to low.
inxi -G
has shown N/A in the driver field.
I’ve rolled back via snapper rollback
, confirmed that nouveau drivers are back in place (resolution was back to normal, inxi -G
has shown nouveau
), and tried to install nvidia-video-G6 using YaST. It has automatically installed all dependencies as well.
Upon login, I faced the same issue - resolution degradation and N/A in the driver field.
Troubleshooting for this issue has shown that secure boot may not allow these drivers to be launched without importing the respective key, as listed in the same Nvidia drivers article. However, the file that needs to be imported is not at the suggested location (/usr/share/nvidia-pubkeys/); in fact, /usr/share only had nvidia folder, which didn’t seem to contain any keys.
As a workaround, I attempted to disable secure boot by entering:
mokutil --disable-validation
. A menu appeared on reboot, through which I disabled secure boot. Further launches had “launching in insecure mode” notice.
mokutil --sb-state
output is SecureBoot disabled
.
Then, I tried to install the driver again, as described above. Still no luck, and same issue.
So, what else could be the issue and what do I do about it next? Thank you in advance for any replies!
Solution that worked: instead of going for install-new-recommends, install the following package:
nvidia-driver-G06-kmp-meta
It should be available by default, but if not, add the respective repository by using this command:
zypper addrepo https://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/tumbleweed/
Thanks to Björn Tantau! The comment with the solution: https://swg-empire.de/comment/7201260
Yeah, like I said, SUSE isn’t the distro I use, but it is frequently at the top of the list when considering what distrit to use when I create a new server or anything like that. Even for my own personal uses, it was like number #2 on my list.
Thing is, as it happens with a lot of Linux, it all comes down to what you’re used to, what you’re comfortable with. And I am very used to and well trained in Debian-based distributions. Currently, I’m running Pop!_OS on a couple of servers.
Pop!_OS is quite an unorthodox choice for a server OS, ain’t it? I’m genuinely interested in why you chose it specifically over, say, Debian or Ubuntu.
I ran Debian and derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint), Arch and derivatives (EndeavourOS, Manjaro), Fedora and OpenSUSE, although each one on a very “user” level; I’m no IT guy, I just value what Linux gives me and am forced to learn to use it well.
Each has their merits. Currently, I go with OpenSUSE because it gives reasonable stability while not going ancient. When set up right, you can rely on it to keep doing things the same way, without needing to intervene manually. It also features correctly set snapper by default, which ensures I, as a generally non-technical user, won’t shoot myself in the foot.
Ideally, I would go with OpenSUSE Slowroll, as I love the concept, but it is still experimental and I don’t want both my machines to rely on beta builds. Still, my laptop has it installed and it works like a charm. The idea of “nearly bleeding-edge, but behind the most adventurous users” is why I chose Manjaro as my first distribution back in the day. Sadly, it is poorly managed, and issues arising with AUR only make things worse. OpenSUSE Slowroll feels to me like Manjaro done right.
As per other distributions I tried:
So, OpenSUSE it is. I never knew I would end up here, but here I am. Slowroll on my laptop for the last half a year or so convinced me to ditch EndeavourOS on my desktop and go OpenSUSE as well. Up to a rough start, but hoping it will go well after that.