How To Install Nvidia Driver on Linux Mint 20

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nvidia Driver on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, The performance of graphics processing units (GPUs) mainly depends on drivers. Ubuntu by default uses the open-source video driver Nouveau which has limited support and features when compared with proprietary Nvidia drivers. Installing NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu is an easy task that can be done in less than a minute. Ubuntu includes a tool that can detect the graphics card model and install the appropriate NVIDIA drivers. Alternatively, you can download and install the drivers from the NVIDIA site.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Nvidia Driver on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 20
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Nvidia Driver on Linux Mint 20 Ulyana

Step 1. Before running the tutorial below, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update

Step 2. Installing Nvidia Driver on Linux Mint 20.

Now detect the model of your Nvidia graphic card and the recommended driver using the following commands below:

ubuntu-drivers devices

To only list drivers applicable to your system, you can do:

sudo ubuntu-drivers list

Output:

nvidia-driver-390

From the above output, we can conclude that the current system has NVIDIA GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 6GB] graphic card installed and the recommended driver to install is Nvidia-390. If you agree with the recommendation feel free to use the ubuntu-drivers command again to install all recommended drivers:

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

Alternatively, install the desired driver selectively using the apt command:

sudo apt install nvidia-390

Once installed, you just need to restart the system or type it in the terminal:

reboot

To check the Nvidia driver version and verify the installation, you can type the following command in the terminal:

nvidia-smi

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Nvidia Driver. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of Nvidia Driver on the Linux Mint system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Nvidia website.