Installation of NVIDIA GPU Driver and CUDA Toolkit

Installation of NVIDIA GPU Driver and CUDA Toolkit

Disable default driver

1. modify /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf by adding following commond at the end of the file:blacklist nouveau
2. modify /etc/default/grub file by adding rdblacklist=nouveau nouveau.modeset=0

Install NVIDIA GPU Driver

1. type ctrl+alt+F1 to tty and log in.
2. shut down lightdm sudo service lightdm stop
3. add source sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa,sudo apt-get update.
4. install driver. Note that the version of the driver must be correspondent to the GPU card. One can find the correct version in NVIDIA official website. For example, my GPU is GTX970M, then I should use the following commend: sudo apt-get install nvidia-352 and sudo apt-get install nvidia-352-uvm
5. reboot

Install CUDA Toolkit

1. download CUDA 7.0 .run file from NVIDIA website. Note that the CUDA version should be correspendent to gcc version and driver version.
2. change .run file mode by chmod +x *.run
3. install CUDA by sudo ./*.run. Note to skip the installation of driver.
4. add necessary environment path by PATH=/path/to/cuda/bin:$PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/cuda/lib64:$LD_IBRARY_PATH and export the paths. Alternatively, one can modify /etc/profile to set the environment paths. Add export PATH="/path/to/cuda/bin:$PATH" and in commond line type source /etc/profile
5. verify the installation. Change directory to CUDA sample and make the samples. Run a sample sudo ./deviceQuery to verify the installation.