How to get Davinci Resolve 16 to work in Linux Ubuntu 18.04

Davinci Resolve has official support for Linux since version 15. However, when trying to install it I ran into a few issues. I have an AMD video card so I can not give instructions for the NVIDIA drivers but the concepts are the same. I hope this article helps in fixing your issues to get Resolve running smoothly. Note, that there is always a risk when installing drivers. When you continue it is at your own risk!

Proprietary drivers and OpenCL

Open-source drivers are not supported in Davinci Resolve so you will need to install proprietary drivers. One caveat is that Resolve uses OpenCL, and even though there are different Linux packages that support they did not work for me. Using the proprietary OpenCL package from the AMD drivers did work!

Download and install the driver

First, check which video card you have. Open a terminal and type:

lspci | grep VGA

Use that information on the AMD support page to download your driver package and unzip it. It should contain a file called amdgpu-pro-install. We can use this file to install the required drivers.

Important! If you run an enterprise edition you might need to use a different option for OpenCL.

./amdgpu-pro-install -y --opencl=legacy,pal

Great, now it is time for a reboot:

sudo reboot

Required packages for Davinci Resolve

We have to install some packages for building and running Davinci Resolve.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libssl1.0.0 ocl-icd-opencl-dev fakeroot xorriso

Downloading Davinci Resolve

Go to the bottom of the product page and download the version you want. This should give you a .run file that contains an installer for the CentOS distribution. We will have to repackage this into a .deb file which we can install on Ubuntu.

For this, we can download a script made by Daniel Tufvesson. Make sure you move it to the same folder as the .run file. and then execute it:

./makeresolvedeb_16.1.2-1.sh studio # use lite instead of studio when you downloaded the free version

This can take some minutes and will result in a .deb file. which we can install with:

sudo dpkg -i davinci-resolve-studio_16.*_amd64.deb

Please reboot again.

Activation

If you have the studio version you have to activate it again. It seems each Davinci Resolve Studio key comes with two activations. The default behavior seems that it will deactivate the oldest machine when there are no activations left. If this does not work you should contact Blackmagic Design.

Debugging

When Davinci Resolve did install but you can not run it you can debug it by starting the Resolve binary in a terminal:

/opt/resolve/bin/resolve 

The logs are located at:

~/.local/share/DaVinciResolve/logs/

But when you did not install the video card driver correctly they do not give much information besides an “Aborted” status.

You can check if the driver is set correctly with:

sudo lshw -c video

For AMD it should say:

configuration: driver=amdgpu

Furthermore, check if that amdgpu-pro is listed in the installed packages:

dpkg -l amdgpu-pro

If there is any issue make sure you did not forget to reboot! For more information, there is a long thread in the official Blackmagic Design forum.

Conclusion

I almost gave up, but now that it Davinci Resolve is running it works very smoothly and even faster than on Windows.

I did not find any deal-breaking issues. It seems not all formats are supported for the Linux version but converting some input files with FFmpeg should be a piece of cake. Furthermore, I still have an issue that seems to be related to my video card where I can not see the timelines in the Fairlight tab. However, I do not use Fairlight often so it is not a big issue for me.

Do you have Davinci Resolve running and was this article helpful? Please consider to buy me a coffee!