Fresh install of Silverblue 41 and I cannot install Nvidia cuda

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1

I have just installed a new system of Fedora Silverblue 41. For Nvidia drivers I followed these instructions:

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#OSTree_.28Silverblue.2FKinoite.2Fetc.29

The nvidia drivers installed ok and lsmod shows nvidia drivers.

When I try to install cuda I get: error: Package/capability ‘akmod-nvidia’ is already requested

nvcc and nvidia-smi show nothing. The Nvidia X Server GUI show the Nvidia M40 24GB

What am I missing?

I don’t know if it matters but I have an AMD Radeon RX 7600 installed to use with LM Studio and this application does not require that I install ROCm so ROCM is not installed.

I hope I formatted this post right. Thanks in advance.

2

The message indicates that package akmod-nvidia has already been layered.

Try layering the cuda package only:

sudo rpm-ostree install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
3

This appears to have worked. I get output from nvidia-smi. I have not tried any applications yet.

I guess I read the instructions as step 1, step 2, step 3 when step 2 and 3 would have worked best as I needed drivers and cuda.

Thanks

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4

Happy to hear it worked.

Indeed, the instructions are a bit misleading in this particular case.

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5

It appears those instructions are intended to be used as

sudo rpm-ostree install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia

OR

sudo rpm-ostree install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda #optional if using nvidia-smi or cuda

but do not make that clear.

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6

I would note also that dnf simply reports one package is already installed and continues to install the second. It seems rpm-ostree is not that forgiving and cannot handle an attempt to install a package that is already installed.

To me that seems a problem with rpm-ostree coding.

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7

I agree that rpm-ostree is not as feature-rich as dnf. The syntax of the error message can be somewhat misleading too (error: Package/capability '<packageName>' is already requested).

On the other hand, the rpm-ostree install command doesn’t offer a confirmation dialog in the way dnf install does, in which case it’s probably better for the command not to be executed, since the user has no option to review a possibly wrong command syntax.

The process is also more time-consuming, since installing a package via rpm-ostree means overlaying that package and its missing dependencies on top of the current deployment and creating a new local image.

Having said that, installing packages on atomic desktops by overlaying them with rpm-ostree install is the exception, so a possibly less user-friendly interface has lower impact than dnf install on traditional systems. For this reason, I also expect a slower pace of adding new features to rpm-ostree in comparison to dnf.

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