Intro
The goal is to run a newer kernel on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS which may improve performance on more modern systems. Sometimes this is trouble when running hardware like the RTX 5090 or RTX 5080 because of the proprietary driver installer.
Here’s what I did to get up annd running on Kernel 6.12.3-061203-generic with 6.12.3-061203-generic #202412060638
First, The Kernel
It helps if you do the installation with a different GPU, or the system’s integrated GPU (iGPU) before installing the new graphics card.
By default Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is Kernel 6.8. Kernel 6.8 has a lot of stuff backported to it, but I generally like to run mainline
kernels for other reasons. They’re newer.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cappelikan/ppa
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt install -y mainline
mainline
mainline list
mainline install 6.12.3
Pay attention to mainline list
! You might have a newer kernel available to you.
Reboot and verify the kernel versionn at a terminal with uname -a
Nvidia Driver Installer, and GCC version
Before installing the proprietary driver from nvidia, I recommend installing steam and setting up a few games. You likely won’t be able to play them because of the missing graphics card but it is helpful because steam wants to install a lot of dependencies that the nvidia driver will also want. Like 32 bit support stuff.
This can be a bit of a rabbit hole to dive into, but to keep this how-to brief I’ll skip that for now. If there are a lot of questions, I’ll add an addendum though.
For some reason on my fresh out-of-the-box Ubuntu 24.04 I installed for this guide the GCC version was a bit old.
This prevented the nvidia driver from installing for mysterious reasons until I took a look at /var/log/nvidia-installer.log
sudo apt install gcc-14
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-14 14
# and finally!
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-570.86.16.run
The commands there were what I needed to do as a pre-req before innstalling the 570.86.16 run file so that it could compile successfully. I suspect this would have been a problem evenn if I didn’t want to run a mainline kernel?
At any rate I hope this helps someone else on the bleeding edge with Ubuntu.
Have you tried Baazite? (lol)
TBD/WIP this post but lmk if you run into anything. This will likely be in the linux channel video.