I’m currently giving the Nouveau driver (open source reverse-engineered NVIDIA drivers) a test drive on my computer. I have a PCI-Express NVIDIA GeForce 7600GT, and the 2D side of things are working extremely well.
Dragging windows around is extremely fast, with no laggy artifacts left behind. Even the Composite extension works — I’m currently running the Metacity compositor (Metacity 2.21 actually works with NVIDIA cards as it no longer depends on the libcm library) and it is smooth.
The one thing I haven’t got going yet is 3D acceleration. According to Dave Airlie’s talk on Friday, you need to use Gallium3D in order to get 3D acceleration with the Nouveau driver, which I don’t really feel like using until somebody creates some Debian packages. However, Dave did demonstrate OpenArena running on Nouveau on Friday, and it worked extremely well — excellent framerate and no visual glitches.
I’ve installed Nouveau with RAOF’s PPA. You need to completely remove nvidia-glx before you install Nouveau. I also had some conflicts with two versions of the drm (not an acronym for Digital Rights Management) kernel module being installed at the same time. Try this if you’re having trouble:
$ sudo modprobe -r drm $ sudo insmod /lib/modules/`uname -r`/extra/drm.ko
That will force Nouveau’s drm module to load instead of the kernel one. You’ll need to do that on every bootup, as I haven’t yet bothered to figure out how to do that automatically.
