NVIDIA Driver Installation — Local AI on Linux (Chapter 2)

On Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04, the Nouveau driver is loaded by default and must be disabled before the proprietary driver can function. Check with lsmod | grep nouveau. If it returns output, Nouveau is active and will conflict with the proprietary driver.

Disable it permanently:

sudo bash -c "echo blacklist nouveau > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf"
sudo bash -c "echo options nouveau modeset=0 >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf"
sudo update-initramfs -u

Then install the driver. Use the Ubuntu-owned package, not the .run installer from NVIDIA's website unless you have a specific reason:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535  # 535 is a stable long-lived branch
sudo reboot

After reboot, verify:

nvidia-smi
# Expected output:
# +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
# | NVIDIA-SMI 535.183.01   Driver Version: 535.183.01  CUDA Version: 12.2     |
# | GPU  Name   Temp/Memory/Pwr  Util  Corp |
# |   0  RTX 3090    42C   24GB /  24GB    15W  Default |
# +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The "CUDA Version" in nvidia-smi header is the maximum supported CUDA runtime version, not what you have installed. Actual CUDA toolkit version comes from nvcc --version.

Failure mode: The driver installs but nvidia-smi fails with NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. This usually means the kernel module failed to load. Check with lsmod | grep nvidia. If empty, run sudo modprobe nvidia and check dmesg | grep -i nvidia for the error. Common cause: kernel ABI mismatch after a kernel update and the DKMS rebuild did not complete.

Failure mode: update-initramfs -u fails because the initramfs is mounted on a device that depends on Nouveau. Boot into recovery mode and run the blacklist commands from there, then reboot.

Failure mode: You install the .run installer and it overwrites /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnvidia-rtcore.so*, breaking Steam or other applications that link against the distribution's libglvnd. Use the .run installer only when you are running a custom kernel that the distribution package does not support.