Call of Nouveau testing reply
by davidnielsen
Christopher James Halse Rogers asked. I thought I would answer in video format (Blip.tv – Flash warning).
A full resolution Ogg Theora file is also available thanks to the awesome blip.tv here.
Also glad to see OMG UBuntu! not only picked up my first video demoing a few of Banshee 1.5.5’a features but also my discovery in the Banshee Community Extensions that UBuntu Mono maintainer and part time superhero Jo Shields is working on an Ubuntu One Music Store Extension for Banshee and in an additional lavishing of much deserved attention to the Banshee project they reported on the merging of the exciting Grid View branch.
System.NullReferenceException 
Well, I have a lot of problems with the latest drivers for nvidia, I have to use the version 173 of them and the 3D aceleration it’s not so great as on Karmic.
Actually, is any chance to have nouveau and 3D on Lucid or we have to wait until Maverick?
Regards!
You can use the xorg-edgers PPA, however this requires you to use a .34 based kernel (which is included in the PPA). It is experimental and not all cards are supported. Reverting the change using ppa-purge should be viable but you should still know how to recover from a non starting X or a kernel that doesn’t boot.
That being said, I’ve seen overheating happen with the new .34 kernel based kernel and nouveau. Probably from power management being inferior to the blob.
You can try out the early version of the nouveau Gallium3D driver using the xorg-edgers PPA (be sure to read all the instructions first). Now you will be moved to a .34 kernel (which very likely doesn’t yet have all the Ubuntu patches which have yet to go upstream such as AppArmor). It is useful to know how to recover from a non booting kernel and how to use ppa-purge before enabling the PPA, both are very easy to master and are great for worst case scenerios to revert to a known working configuration.
I’ve happily been using this for a couple of months, however since moving to the .34 kernel both in the ppa and as part of Maverick I have started seeing overheating issues (happens with both nouveau and the blob though less frequently with the latter). Hence I am using the blob currently. Also Nouveau does not yet enable anything akin to VDPAU so for machines such as my Aspire Revo there is basically no HD playback without the blob currently.
Well, Thanks for your quickly answer. THat’s very clear explanation. Maybe I install another Ubuntu instance in this machine (it’s a familiar and work machine XD) and try your advice.
Thanks!