How To Install Nvidia Drivers on Linux Mint 21

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nvidia Drivers on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, The performance of graphics processing units (GPUs) mainly depends on drivers. Linux Mint by default uses the open-source video driver Nouveau which has limited support and features when compared with proprietary Nvidia drivers. The official Nvidia driver provides better performance and more features, making it the better choice for demanding applications.

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 Drivers on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).
• 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, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Nvidia Drivers on Linux Mint 21 Vanessa

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
sudo apt install software-properties-common apt-transport-https wget ca-certificates gnupg2

Step 2. Installing Nvidia Drivers on Linux Mint 21.

By default, Nvidia Drivers is not available on the Linux Mint 21 base repository. Now we add the Nvidia repository to your system using the following command:

echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/graphic-drivers-ppa.gpg] https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/graphics-drivers/ppa/ubuntu jammy main' | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/graphic-drivers-ppa.list

Next, import the GPG key:

sudo gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/graphic-drivers-ppa.gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 2388FF3BE10A76F638F80723FCAE110B1118213C

Now start by updating the packages list and install Nvidia Drivers stable version by using the command below:

sudo apt update
ubuntu-drivers devices

As mentioned above, usually, it is preferred to try installing the recommended driver. In order to do that, you just type in:

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

In addition, If you want something specific or choose another version, type in:

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-515

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

reboot

Finally, 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 Drivers. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of the Nvidia Drivers on the Linux Mint system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Nvidia website.