Guide to install Caffe + Ubuntu 14.04 LTS + Asus N551JQ (dGPU + iGPU)

[Emiel Stoelinga]

So, I've spent a week and a half getting Caffe to work on my machine. I've finally managed to do so on my Asus N551JQ which is running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. The laptop features an NVIDIA GT845M dGPU and Intel HD Graphics iGPU, which caused some problems installing NVIDIA drivers. However, everything is working now. As it took me a long time to get everything running, I figured I could help future users by explaining my method of installation. Below is the method I used:

1. Install a clean version of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
   
2. Download NVIDIA Geforce driver 352.79 from: http://www.geforce.com/drivers
   
3. Download CUDA 7.0 from: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-70
   
4. Follow post #4 on the following link untill point 5 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2246526#4. Then navigate to the download directory where you saved the drivers that you previously downloaded in step 2 of this tutorial and run the setup by: sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-352.79.run  --no-opengl-files
   Do not exclude the --no-opengl-files part.
5. Go on with step 7 of the guide in the link by going into the directory in which you extracted the CUDA archive and installing CUDA and its samples.
6. Then go on with the guide in post #5 in the same thread. Thereafter, NVIDIA drivers should be working and CUDA should be installed. Time to start with the Caffe installation!
7. You can pretty much follow the following guide: http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/install_apt.html
   Be sure to correctly install ALL dependencies. If anything fails, fix it.
8. After compilation, my make runtest wouldn't start. I had to set an environment variable in ~/.profile "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/cuda/lib64" and had to reboot before it started and succesfully executed.

By now, everything should work. Congratulations!

Hope I have helped you.

Regards,

Emiel Stoelinga

[Jan C Peters]

For those who are unaware of that, I want to add:

There are two kinds of laptops with NVidia GPUs: the ones that use the Optimus technology, and the ones who do not. Almost all laptops that use the NVidia GPU as a secondary option and also have a primary GPU (often an Intel HD Graphics), belong to the former kind. Which can be a real pain in the a** for linux users (to access the NVidia card; I am speaking from first-hand experience). With the latter kind the installation of the nvidia-driver and CUDA is straightforward, it works just like installing CUDA on a Linux Desktop, and there are hundreds of guides how to do that. For the Optimus Laptops the matter is more intricate. If you want to use the NVidia card for graphics, look into Bumblebee. If you just want to use the NVidia card for CUDA (and not graphics output and OpenGL), you do not need to install bumblebee, in fact you should not. But you need the regular nvidia driver, only without installing the OpenGL files. I am not sure if blacklisting nouveau is necessary in this case or not. I am sure there are some guides floating around the internet about that.

Jan

[Shaunak De]

Thank you for your clarification. This caused me a lot of headaches. 

I was just wondering why you say " in fact you should not " for Bumblebee. I sometimes use the laptop to run Google Earth and visualize my results, and GPU rendering might be useful. It is not that I can not live without it, but I was just curios as to why.