A build of the nouveau video driver for nVidia cards was included in the Ubuntu repositories beginning with Jaunty.  I’ve been meaning to test it for a while, and finally found some hardware recently to give it a shot.

Much to the chagrin of free-software stalwarts, nVidia has always refused to provide a full-featured open-source Linux driver for its video chips.  Instead, it offers the nv driver, which supports only 2D acceleration–meaning no desktop effects–and whose source is ostensibly open, but is partially obfuscated and not very useful to third-party developers.

nVidia also offers a free (but not Free) closed-source driver that provides 3D support, and although the process of installing this driver in Ubuntu has been greatly simplified in recent releases, the fact that it’s proprietary presents a number of philosophical, legal and technical obstacles for Ubuntu developers and users.

To solve this problem, the cleverly named nouveau project was launched a few years ago to develop a full-featured, open-source video driver for nVidia chips.  As its feature s