Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, the NVIDIA 304.123 legacy driver for Linux has been released a while ago, coming with support for some old NVIDIA GPUs, including GeForce GTX 690, GeForce 6100 and GeForce 6600. Also, the compatibility with recent kernels has been improved, some bugs have been squashed, the nvidia-bug-report.sh has been updated to search the systemd journal for x server logs, support for the X.org xserver ABI 18 has been added and an interaction problem with xserver 1.15 that caused some OpenGL issues has been fixed. For more information, see the release notes.
In this article I will show you how to install the NVIDIA 304.121 graphics drivers on the most popular Linux systems, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia and OpenMandriva.
Because the drivers are available as precompiled binaries, all we have to do is downlod the drivers, set execution permissions, kill the GUI and run the drivers.
Download the driver, for 32 bit systems:
$ wget us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/304.123/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-304.123.run
Download the driver, for 64 bit systems:
$ wget us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/304.123/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-304.123.run
Set execution permissions:
$ sudo chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-*.run
Kill the display manager, which can either be: kdm for KDE, gdm for Gnome, lightdm for LXDE and XFCE (i think), mdm (for Linux Mint):
$ sudo /etc/init.d/kdm stop
OR:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop
OR:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm stop
OR:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/mdm stop
Run the installer:
$ sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-*.run
Start the display manager after the installation has been finished, kdm for KDE, gdm for Gnome, lightdm for LXDE and XFCE (i think), mdm (for Linux Mint):
$ sudo /etc/init.d/kdm start
OR:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start
OR:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm start
OR:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/mdm start