I’ve installed Fedora 36 with all non-free repositories enabled and was looking forward to adding the NVIDIA GPU drivers with a single/simple command. It does work well, but I had a few headaches getting to this point. Here’s what worked for me.
- update all packages (naturally)
- switch into command line mode
- install the akmod-nvidia package
- switch back into GUI mode
- et voila – NVIDIA drivers working great
This is how I did it:
systemctl set-default multi-user.targetNow restart. You’ll be on the command line already. Login, switch to root and do this:
dnf install akmod-nvidia
systemctl set-default graphical.targetRestart again into GUI mode, and enjoy the NVIDIA drivers.
I had issues trying to do all this manually, following a very detailed article by If True Then False, but it just wasn’t working for me. The RPM version worked a treat, but when I tried to install it from the GUI before, it didn’t remove the Nouveau drivers properly (makes sense now that I think about it). Command line install was the way to go.
What’s the difference between akmod and kmod packages?
For the curious: when you dnf list *nvidia*, you’ll notice both akmod and kmod packages as well as several dependencies. From what I read on various forum posts, kmod seems to be the source code that’s used by akmod for compilation, hence it is indeed the akmod package that needs to be installed for the drivers to work.
Furthermore, there appear to be two NVIDIA drivers available at the time of writing, one being called “akmod-nvidia”, the other one “akmod-nvidia-470xx”. The latter appears to be for legacy GPUs such as the GTX 7xx, GTX6xx, Quadro and Tesla cards. It stands to reason that over the next couple of years, the GTX 9xx and 10xx cards will get their own legacy driver, presumably with a different version number (yet to be determined).