Okay, so I have an old gaming rig (4th gen i7, GTX 1070ti) that I want to turn into a home server. I’d like to use the GPU only for specific tasks, like encoding when watching stuff via Jellyfin. What would be easier?
- Install Fedora or Rocky Linux with the normal GUI, install and configure the Nvidia drivers with akmod-nvidia, then just remove X/Wayland from the startup process?
- Install either distro sans GUI, and install the nvidia drivers? Also, does akmod-nvidia work for systems with no display server?
So yeah. Any Linux people out there with nvidia cards and purely CLI servers out there? I’ve got a fair bit of experience with Linux, but I’ve just never done this before. And Google keeps giving me results about troubleshooting black screens after installing the drivers.
For sanity, use RHEL or a RHEL clone and not Fedora (less kernel updates, less opportunity for nvidia driver breakage), then use the official Nvidia rpm repo and the setup should be pretty straightforward.
I think you may be interested in ProxMox. You can pass through the GPU to a VM or CT.
That way if you get tired of troubleshooting, you can just create a new VM.