Linux Mint NVIDIA Driver Installation Guide

Welcome to our guide on how to install NVIDIA drivers on Linux Mint. You should only do this installation if your system has NVIDIA GPU card. My machine has GeForce GTX 965M graphics card which delivers the ultimate PC gaming experience.

To show all devices which need drivers in your Linux Mint 18 system, use the ubuntu-drivers command.

$ ubuntu-drivers devices
 == /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
 modalias : pci:v000010DEd00001427sv0000103Csd00008257bc03sc02i00
 vendor   : NVIDIA Corporation
 model    : GM206M [GeForce GTX 965M]
 driver   : nvidia-driver-390 - distro non-free recommended
 driver   : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

This will give you the card vendor, model and the recommended driver that can be installed. From the output, we can see the recommended driver is nvidia-driver-390.

Install NVIDIA Drivers on Linux Mint

To install the driver recommended above, execute the command below as user with sudo privileges.

$ sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall
......
depmod…
 DKMS: install completed.
 Setting up libnvidia-gl-390:amd64 (390.77-0ubuntu0.18.04.1) …
 Setting up libnvidia-ifr1-390:amd64 (390.77-0ubuntu0.18.04.1) …
 Setting up nvidia-driver-390 (390.77-0ubuntu0.18.04.1) …
 Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.130ubuntu3.6) …
 update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-20-generic
 Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.27-3ubuntu1) …

This installs the drivers that are appropriate for automatic installation. You can show all driver packages which apply to the current system using:

$ ubuntu-drivers  list
nvidia-driver-390

$  lspci -vnn | grep VGA
 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 530 [8086:191b] (rev 06) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

Reboot your system to use NVIDIA graphics card drivers.

sudo reboot

Verify

$ dkms status
 nvidia, 390.77, 4.15.0-20-generic, x86_64: installed

You need to install the nvidia-settings package which provides graphical tool for configuring Nvidia card settings.

sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings