How to install Nvidia CUDA 5.5 on Ubuntu

What is CUDA? CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture)
was developed by Nvidia from 2006, it’s a parallel rather than single thread computing programming platform which allows GPUs (graphics processing units) work better and more efficiently. There are more than 300 million GPUs in desktops, notebooks, workstations, even supercomputers support CUDA that help to simulate physics, astronomy, biology programs to run.

You can download .deb for Ubuntu here.

For Ubuntu and Linux Mint 32bit

$ wget http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1204/i386/cuda-repo-ubuntu1204_5.5-0_i386.deb

For Ubuntu and Linux Mint 64bit

$ wget http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1204/x86_64/cuda-repo-ubuntu1204_5.5-0_amd64.deb

Remove old NVIDIA driver

# /usr/bin/nvidia-uninstall

Install the .deb 32bit file to add cuda.list to your /sources.list.d/ you downloaded

# gdebi cuda-repo-ubuntu1204_5.5-0_i386.deb

Install the .deb 64bit file to add cuda.list to your /sources.list.d/ you downloaded

# gdebi cuda-repo-ubuntu1204_5.5-0_amd64.deb

Finally, we can install CUDA

# apt-get update
# apt-get install cuda

Then run to set the PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variables.

export CUDA_ROOT=/usr/local/cuda-5.5
export PATH=$PATH:$CUDA_ROOT/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$CUDA_ROOT/lib64