Nvidia Driver cuda nvcc Troubleshooting

thinkmelt@protonmail.com

Jun 7, 2026 • 4 min read

Nvidia drivers can be quite the challenge.

We had so many issues troubleshooting and getting our Nvidia drivers to work with our particular kernel of Linux (ParrotOS latest) that we wrote this guide. Pretty much every LLM needs a full suite of drivers/nvcc etc so this guide might help you, as it is not very well documented.

Because we are getting into cuda nvcc compiler development as well that follows this at the end.

In our case we are running a very recent version of Linux, and all the standard nvidia drivers did not seem to work. We were seeing constant errors at /var/log/nvdia-installer.log Our instance:

┌─[✗]─[c@parrot]─[~]
└──╼ $uname -a
Linux parrot 7.0.9+parrot7-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Parrot 7.0.9-1parrot1 (2026-05-28) x86_64 GNU/Linux

Firstly purge out your drivers, and install some supports

sudo apt purge nvidia*
sudo apt update
sudo apt install dwarves libelf-dev build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Next we will work from this github:

So:

Part 1. Getting to nvidia-smi

git clone https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
cd open-gpu-kernel-modules/

make modules -j$(nproc)
sudo make modules_install -j$(nproc)

At this point you may reach errors thus:

sudo apt install mokutil && mokutil --sb-state 
sudo depmod -a
sudo modprobe nvidia

Installing the main Nvidia 6.10 drivers w/ --no-kernel-modules Option

At this point we will need to get the latest drivers and specifically install them as in:

wget https://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/610.43.02/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-610.43.02.run
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-610.43.02.run
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-610.43.02.run --no-kernel-modules

You will get a warning where you are installing the latest Nvidia drivers - without installing the kernel drivers because you did that manually above:

It actually worked, wow!

We pulled this off while in GUI X-11 mode, as in:

After sudo reboot we actually have our basic nvidia-smi

Part II: Getting to nvcc / cuda-toolkit

If your nvida-smi driver is installed we can now focus on the nvidia-cuda-toolkit,

Try 1: script

# Download and install the CUDA repository keyring
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu2404/x86_64/cuda-keyring_1.1-1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i cuda-keyring_1.1-1_all.deb

# Refresh package lists
sudo apt update

# Install the CUDA Toolkit (includes nvcc and development components)
sudo apt install cuda-toolkit

Or Try 2: Direct download from

wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu2604/x86_64/cuda-ubuntu2604.pin
sudo mv cuda-ubuntu2604.pin /etc/apt/preferences.d/cuda-repository-pin-600
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/13.3.0/local_installers/cuda-repo-ubuntu2604-13-3-local_13.3.0-610.43.02-1_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu2604-13-3-local_13.3.0-610.43.02-1_amd64.deb
sudo cp /var/cuda-repo-ubuntu2604-13-3-local/cuda-*-keyring.gpg /usr/share/keyrings/
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install cuda-toolkit-13-3

At this point, we are looking at large downloads as it pulls in the supports.

A successful run will give this at the end:

Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.28-1) ...
Processing triggers for mailcap (3.74) ...
Scanning processes...
Scanning processor microcode...
Scanning linux images...

Running kernel seems to be up-to-date.

The processor microcode seems to be up-to-date.

No services need to be restarted.

No containers need to be restarted.

No user sessions are running outdated binaries.

No VM guests are running outdated hypervisor (qemu) binaries on this host.
--------------------------------------------------
[!] Scanning application launchers
Removing duplicate or broken launchers...
[!] Launchers have been successfully updated!
--------------------------------------------------