Just thought I would report on my attempts to install CUDA on Slackware 13 amd64. Wasn’t sure how to do this initially, as it didn’t appear in the supported list of Linux distros. But I thought I would give it a try, and see what would happen. The amd64 CUDA driver seems to be the same for all distros, and installed just as the normal Nvidia driver does. No problems. I just ensured no X display was running, and on the command line, as root ran
sh cudadriver_2.3_linux_64_190.18.run
This installs the driver, compiles a new kernel module, and installs opengl32 compatibility libs, if required.
Then I installed the CUDA toolkit
again as root, I ran
sh cudatoolkit_2.3_linux_64_ubuntu9.04.run
I inspected the contents of this file before running it in vim, and then got a file listing with ./cudatoolkit_2.3_linux_64_ubuntu9.04.run --list
Nothing seemed too Ubuntu specific (I didn’t read too closely though), so I ran i to see if it worked. It did!
Then I installed the SDK, by running, as a normal user,
sh cudasdk_2.3_linux.run
which installed the SDK into my home directory.
I added the /usr/local/cuda/lib64 into /etc/ld.so.conf, and added /usr/local/cuda/bin to my PATH variable in ~/.bashrc.
cd 'd into ~/NVIDIA_GPU_Computing_SDK/C and ran make to compile the example programs. All went well with nothing failing on anything. I then ran ~/NVIDIA_GPU_Computing_SDK/C/bin/linux/release/devicequery, which confirmed that it had all installed properly and was working, and detected my 9800GT. External Image
So if anyone is looking to run CUDA on Slackware, go for it. As is typical with Slackware, it just works. This is in stark contrast to the problems I had setting CUDA up in Ubuntu Jaunty.