Install CUDA drivers/toolkit on Mint 17.1 MATE

[barelycuda]

Hi,

I'm really tearing my hair out on this one, been at it for hours. I am trying to get the CUDA drivers and toolkit running with a GTX 750Ti card on an old A8N32-SLI-Deluxe ASUS Mobo. Can't get the Nvidia device drivers to install because Nvidia wants X shut down first. Tried every trick I can find (including several from the forum--editing cfg files, resetting boot parameters, etc..) to reboot into bash, but all I get is a black screen on boot, and I am getting REALLY tired of having to use the installation disc to undo the changes.

Every Linux book I have says to change the inittab file, but this distro doesn't have one.

So, first question: how do I boot into bash to install the drivers? I can't believe a distro would be released without an easy, reliable way to do simple, common activities like this.

Follow on: if anyone has successfully installed the CUDA toolkit, I would appreciate any tips that would make that less painful than installing the drivers has been so far.

[richyrich]

Have you tried installing the nvidia-cuda-toolkit from Synaptic Package Manager?

[barelycuda]

Synaptic doesn't have the current hardware drivers, and I still would have to shut down X to install the drivers.

[roblm]

The suggestion by richyrich works for an older Nvidia graphics card. I used it successfully to get CUDA working on a system with a Nvidia GeForce 210 card using the
nvidia-331 driver. I installed Blender and in File > User Preferences > System, there was an option to change the Compute Device to CUDA, which uses the GPU instead
of the CPU.

However, on a system with a GeForce GT 730 card and the nvidia-331 driver installed, it didn't work. Your GTX 750Ti card is not supported by the nvidia-331 driver. To get
CUDA working for a newer Nvidia graphics card, read the information in THIS TOPIC

[barelycuda]

Some of this info may be useful after the initial question posted is addressed, so thanks for that.

Does anyone have experience getting proprietary graphics drivers installed?

[richyrich]

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 20#p847465

[roblm]

barelycuda,

In the link to the topic "GTX960 and Blender" I previously listed, my third post in that topic gives the complete instructions for installing the CUDA toolkit
and Nvidia driver, which are both included in the "cuda_7.0.28_linux.run" package, and are installed at the same time. The Nvidia driver does not
have to be installed separately.