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.
Last I tried this, the Nvidia cli I stalker was easy peasy for my 1050ti.
However, I haven’t took a look at jellyfin, but the Intel quicksync encoder on the Intel chip on my home server did the same encoding tasks and was far less temperamental with plex than Nvidia was. Do you really need the GPU? If it’s just for video encoding I feel like you could skip it. If it’s for more esoteric stuff like running LLM then of course it’s a requirement.