# Davinci Resolve Workstation

I do my editing on Davinci Resolve. Since I am trying to get editing and gaming off of Windows, I created a Davinci Resolve workstation that is based on Rocky Linux 8, the OS Davinci officially supports. While Davinci can be installed on other distros, it doesn't work on my distro of choice, thus might as well create a dedicated VM for it. Since my workstation uses Proxmox, I can easily use different distros.

This guide thus documents my installation process.

## 1) Install Rocky Linux 8.6

You can download the BlackMagic's ISO for easier installation

- Upgrade to latest packages `sudo dnf update`
- Enable networking

By default, wired networking is not automatically turned on.

## 2) Install `amdgpu-pro`

- Remove `nomodeset` and `rdblacklist=nouveau` in grub config in `/etc/default/grub` and `/boot/grub2/grubenv`

`sudo dnf install http://repo.radeon.com/amdgpu-install/6.3/rhel/8.10/amdgpu-install-6.3.60300-1.el8.noarch.rpm sudo amdgpu-install --usecase=workstation --vulkan=pro --opencl=rocr`

- Add user to `video` and `render` group: `sudo usermod -a -G render sudo usermod -a -G video`

## 3) Install Davince Resolve Studio 19

- Install `xcb-util-cursor`: `sudo dnf install epel-release sudo dnf install xcb-util-cursor`

- Download Davinci Resolve Studio 19 by going to support center, clicking the desired version, and finally `Downlod only`

- Extract and run the installer
- Apply crack (confirmed working with version 19.1.2) `sudo perl -pi -e 's/\x00\x85\xc0\x74\x7b\xe8/\x00\x85\xc0\xEB\x7b\xe8/g' /opt/resolve/bin/resolve`

## 4) Install `awesome` window manager

I only care for tiling window managers. Unfortunately, my manager of choice `awesome` is not available on Rocky Linux 8. I thus have to compile it myself, which involces compiling its build dependencies.

Compiling awesome on Rocky Linux 8.10 requires the following dependencies (in order of build): * lua * lua-markdown * lua-lgi * lua-filesystem * lua-ldoc * lua-penlight * xapian-xire * doxygen (note: this ought to be fc29 version) * libxdg-basedir * xcb-util * xcb-util-wm * xcb-util-keysymx * xorg-x11-util-macros * xcb-util-xrm * libxkb * xcb-util-image * xcb-util-renderutil

To build these, you have to go through various iterations of fetching source RPMs from fedora 28 src repo, installing the builddeps and finally rebuilding using `rpbbuild`. Thus, for lua, you would: `wget https://archive.fedoraproject.org/pub/archive/fedora/linux/releases/28/Everything/source/tree/Packages/l/lua-5.3.4-10.fc28.src.rpm sudo dnf builddep lua-*.src.rpm --nobest --refresh rpmbuild --rebuild lua-.src.rpm`

To facilitate installing the built dependencies, you can use `createrepo` to create a repo in `/home/user/rpmbuild` and pointing a new dnf repo to this folder.

Specific notes: * doxygen src rpm should come Fedora 29 * lua-ldoc and lua-penlight depend on each other, thus you will need to temporarily activate the fc28 repo by adding this in `/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo` `[fedora] name=Fedora 28 - x86_64 metalink=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=fedora-28&arch=x86_64 enabled=1 gpgcheck=0` Make sure to disable it after getting lua-ldoc or lua-penlight built.

After building all of your dependencies, clean-up everything by rolling back to the transaction before you started installing build dependencies. Use `dnf history info <transaction no>` to find that number and then `dnf history rollback <transaction no>`

Once everything is rolledback, you can install awesome and just it's runtime dependencies, and then refer to archlinux's awesome-gnome package or the wiki article it is based on to integrate awesome in gnome.

## 5) Install git-annex standalone

I use git-annex to store my footage. Indeed, there isn't a git-annex package, but it is easy to install git-annex standalone by following upstream's guide

## Other options

I mentionned above that there were other ways to install Davinci on Linux without having to use Rocky Linux. Here are a few: * via distrobox * on debian * on arch * on fedora

Created Sun Jan 12 20:32:12 2025. Edited Sun Jan 12 20:32:12 2025.