NVIDIA driver install instructions - legal issues?

Project Discussion
1

I tried to improve the Beginner’s Guide by adding CLI installation instructions for NVIDIA drivers from RPM Fusion.

Turns out, this is not allowed, because of legal issues?

This is confusing to me, because:

  1. We have a built-in GUI option to enable a third-party repo to install the NVIDIA driver.
  2. Other distros, like Ubuntu, even package and provide the NVIDIA driver directly.

How can the above be legal, but providing CLI installation instructions in the doc is illegal?

If this truly is illegal for some reason, then what are we allowed to write instead? Can we just link to the RPM Fusion guide?

I ask because currently, the NVIDIA section of the Beginner’s Guide is pretty useless to any beginner with a NVIDIA GPU. And there are too many questionable NVIDIA install guides floating around on the web, confusing users – we could really use proper documentation.

2

We have contacted Red Hat legal on their mailing list a number of weeks ago for explicit approval, but have not recieved a response.

We also asked about the linking to RPM Fusion as you suggest.

The problem with legality and perceptions of legality is different in each country - in some it is acceptable, in others, it is not acceptable.

I recently found that there is another RPM Fusion repo that only contains Nvidia, and not other patent encumbered codecs. It is to this repo that the installers link to.
It may be worth a discission to see if we can include instructions to that repo.

3

Did you try something like this?

sudo dnf install fedora-workstation-repositories
sudo dnf config-manager setopt rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver.enabled=1
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia

Fedora will object if you use external repo release files.

4

That was a sneaky edit after I posted!

5

Thank you for the explanation. It would certainly be great if we could do this.

No, I basically re-used the instructions from the RPM Fusion setup page, which in retrospect was too broad.
I like your solution. Can we do this?

Set up RPM Fusion NVIDIA repo

sudo dnf install fedora-workstation-repositories
sudo dnf config-manager setopt rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver.enabled=1

Install NVIDIA driver

sudo dnf upgrade -y  # and reboot if you are not on the latest kernel
sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda  # for CUDA/NVDEC/NVENC support
6

The official NVIDIA guide is pretty decent, would it be possible to link to that at least ?

Fedora — NVIDIA Driver Installation Guide

7

The official guide is better than nothing, but it does have some problems, e.g.

  1. It’s not user friendly - if a new user enters a command like they write: dnf config-manager addrepo --from-repofile=https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/${distro}/${arch}/cuda-${distro}.repo …it will just not work.
  2. NVIDIA is pretty slow at updating repos to match distro releases. For example, Debian 13 was released a long time ago, but it was only recently that they created a repo for it. This created a ton of questions on the internet about whether one could use the Debian 12 repo on Debian 13.
  3. They only host the two latest 595xx versions on that repo. Want the long-lived 580xx version? Got to look at the previous version repo for that. Will lead to lots of confusion.
  4. They probably don’t test them with Fedora with as much care as the RPM Fusion folks do. I remember situations where third-party packagers like the folks at RPM Fusion (and Arch?) would fix things before pushing a new driver release to their stable repos.

I feel NVIDIA is moving in the right direction with this, but RPM Fusion provides a much better experience for desktop usage. NVIDIA’s instructions are more geared towards professional admins who know what they’re doing.