Nvidia driver not found in Runimage! (blender)

[kurageart]

Problem

Hello, I'm playing around with soar.. I installed blender , and while launching I get a pop up saying "Nvidia driver not found in Runimage!" .Blender works, but without cuda or optix support. I'm on debian trixie, and I'm running the open-nvidia driver from nvidia cuda repository.. I didn't find any documentation regarding nvidia driver and soar online ..

Maybe I'm missing something very basic, like I should use the nvidia drivers provided by debian, OR nvidia is not supported at all

Or, just like the debian deb blender: is not compiled with cuda-optix support - for what I know, only on few distros, like cachyos, or endeavour os, alt linux the repo for blender works with cuda and optix.. On debian we should either use the binary from blender website, or flatpak..

Steps to reproduce

soar defconfig --external (just in case)
soar install blender

Expected behavior

Blender works with cuda and optix support, and possibly an updated version , like 5

Soar version (soar -V)

soar-cli 0.9.0

Operating system (if issue is related to OS)

Debian

Installation

wget -qO- "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pkgforge/soar/main/install.sh" | sh

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[Samueru-sama]

@kurageart Can you try this?

https://github.com/pkgforge-dev/Blender-AppImage

[QaidVoid]

The blender from soarpkgs is just repackaged debian version.

@kurageart , you can install the appimage provided by @Samueru-sama using direct link:

soar add https://github.com/pkgforge-dev/blender-AppImage/releases/download/5.0.1-1%402025-12-22_1766390347/Blender-5.0.1-1-anylinux-x86_64.AppImage

It seems to work properly.

[kurageart]

It works perfectly, thanks (beside, for launching, I have to write blender in the terminal). Before coming back here, I tried steam (for arch), that managed to download the proper nvidia-driver from nvidia website, I believe, and made a squash (?) driver installation. Very interesting. Sorry, I'm very new to this project, but it seems very cool...

[Samueru-sama]

It works perfectly, thanks (beside, for launching, I have to write blender in the terminal). Before coming back here, I tried steam (for arch), that managed to download the proper nvidia-driver from nvidia website, I believe, and made a squash (?) driver installation. Very interesting. Sorry, I'm very new to this project, but it seems very cool...

Steam is either the RunImage or this AppImage which is just a trimmed down runimage under the hood.

RunImage has proper handling of the nvidia driver, in the case of Steam it will attempt to use the nvidia driver of the host but that also means the 32bit driver which you may not have hence it downloaded it.

In the case of Blender it is likely RunImage doesn't have code to handle cuda.

[QaidVoid]

beside, for launching, I have to write blender in the terminal

Do the desktop entry not appear in the launcher?

That issue happens with almost all DEs, ig. But, you should be able to see the desktop entry after re-login. soar doesn't update desktop database on install.

Could you try updating desktop database manually?

update-desktop-database

If this works, I'll integrate it with soar.

[kurageart]

I can't see the icon even after reboot. (I'm on gnome , debian stable)

Perhaps installing and removing the other blender version messed the system? Anyway, I can easily make a laucher..
I tried the command update-desktop-database

The databases in [/usr/share/gnome/applications, /home/kurageart/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share/applications, /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications, /usr/local/share/applications, /usr/share/applications] could not be updated.

[Samueru-sama]

@QaidVoid I ran soar add https://github.com/pkgforge-dev/blender-AppImage/releases/download/5.0.1-1%402025-12-22_1766390347/Blender-5.0.1-1-anylinux-x86_64.AppImage but I don't see any desktop entry has been made anywhere. It only added the appimage in the bin dir.

[QaidVoid]

Uh, I see. I had another blender installed, that's why I had the desktop file. It seems desktop integration isn't handled properly for direct URLs.

[Opposite34]

Uh, I see. I had another blender installed, that's why I had the desktop file. It seems desktop integration isn't handled properly for direct URLs.

I want to report that desktop file does work for some direct URL AppImages.

I have this audio tracker app called Furnace installed under soar like so:
furnace = { url = "https://github.com/tildearrow/furnace/releases/download/v0.6.8.3/Furnace-0.6.8.3-x86_64.AppImage" }

and it does create a ~/.local/share/applications/furnace-soar.desktop properly. So you might want to check how the AppImage packaging is different between Furnace and the Blender you packaged here.

Edited: I checked both with --appimage-extract and the squashfs for the Blender Appimage does have the desktop file, but only under squashfs-root/ itself and not under squashfs-root/usr/share/applications/ whereas Furnace have it listed there. Perhaps this made soar not detect the desktop file?

[QaidVoid]

I want to report that desktop file does work for some direct URL AppImages.

Yeah, it does work for SquashFS images. The issue is that blender appimage uses DwarFS, which isn't supported by the library. It could be fixed easily if soar would just use the self-extraction from the appimage itself at the risk of breaking support for NixOS (atleast the old AppImage formats will break) and maybe some other distros that extract AppImage before execute.

[QaidVoid]

@kurageart It should generate the desktop file in latest release.