I’m using the Nouveau driver from OBS on OpenSUSE 11.2 i686 KDE. It’s working pretty well and stable so far. Video playback is not slower than with proprietary drivers.
I’ve also installed the “Mesa-nouveau3d” Package, but can’t get compositing with OpenGL activated in KDE. I tried with an /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the settings recommended on the opensuse wiki page and tried without an xorg.conf too. glxinfo in both cases tells me, that direct rendering is activated.
I know, that this package is experimental and the developers don’t give any support or listen to Bugreports for this, but I heard of people getting Compiz to work with this driver, so perhaps KWin could work too. My video card is a GeForce 6600GT which seems to be good supported on the Status Page for Nouveau development.
Has anybody else tried (perhaps succesfully) to get desktop effects enabled in KDE with the nouveau driver?
Tried it as well. Compiz worked, kWin did not. Even tried to turn off all desktop effects, still no compositing. But this was merely some kind of hobby experiment on a spare partition.
I have tried compiz with gnome too now. It gets activated, but it immediately did exit the gnome-session to KDM. After relogging it was very buggy and unusable. As it’s an experimental driver, and I dont want to use it or gnome/compiz, I think I will end my experiment with the 3D-part of this driver, but stick a little bit with 2D nouveau. It seems to be even a little bit faster than the proprietary one, and didn’t make any problems yet. I’m looking forward to free, opensource, nvidia 3D-power.
Trying Fedora 12 was the reason I tried this one. Video playback was really fast on that system (I could play 1080p videos with any backend, while in OpenSUSE with proprietary drivers only xine was satisfying).
I must say I really do not like nouveau. One because it is hard to spell, but mainly because it is a royal PITA to deal with.
It embeds itself so much that it will not allow you to remove the blasted module from memory, you HAVE to blacklist it.
This causes major problems when you want to install the proper Nvidia driver as it means you HAVE to reboot the machine after installing then blacklisting it.
I like to install the nvidia driver sometimes on a liveCD, which I can do without rebooting, but with noveau in there it refuses to budge which makes it impossible.
I really think it’s a complete waste of space, I mean compositing doesn’t work so why is it any better than the old nv driver?
The nouveau driver is built upon the latest technologies in Kernel and X11. It supports Kernel Mode Setting, Xv Video playback acceleration, RandR for multiple Displays, Gallium3D and is not dependent on any proprietary parts (at least for GeForce6xxx, all others still needed proprietary firmware last time I looked at it).
The problems with nouveau and proprietary drivers installed at the same time are known… but which is the more invasive driver? Fact is, they have problems to co-exist on your system, but to blame solely nouveau for that is just wrong.
Nouveau is meant to be a full replacement of the proprietary driver, something nv (as far as I know) never was planned to do. Nouveau already has 3D-acceleration, but just in experimental stage.
It will be included in the 2.6.33 Kernel, so it will be hard to get around this. I hope, that either NVidia or the kernel/nouveau team will fix problems with additional proprietary driver installed. But as long as you can blacklist one of them, distributions could work around this, so the user won’t feel any of the problems under the hood.
>
> I must say I really do not like nouveau. One because it is hard
> to spell, but mainly because it is a royal PITA to deal with.
>
> It embeds itself so much that it will not allow you to remove the
> blasted module from memory, you HAVE to blacklist it.
>
> This causes major problems when you want to install the proper
> Nvidia driver as it means you HAVE to reboot the machine after
> installing then blacklisting it.
>
> I like to install the nvidia driver sometimes on a liveCD, which I
> can do without rebooting, but with noveau in there it refuses to
> budge which makes it impossible.
>
> I really think it’s a complete waste of space, I mean compositing
> doesn’t work so why is it any better than the old nv driver?
>
I just ran into this on my MS4 system after upgrade today. Can you
post how to black list the nouveau driver. My post is from user
upscope at 03:32PM today. I would appreciate it so I can get back to
nvidia driver at least for now.
>
> upscope;2145490 Wrote:
>>
>>
>> I just ran into this on my MS4 system after upgrade today. Can
>> you post how to black list the nouveau driver. My post is from
>> user upscope at 03:32PM today. I would appreciate it so I can get
>> back to nvidia driver at least for now.
>>
> Sure, edit /etc/modprobe.d/50-blacklist.conf and add blacklist
> nouveau to the end, save and reboot.
>
>
Thank you I will try it later today, then hopefully Nvidia will
install. If I understood your original post, after I install Nvidia
driver and Need to blacklist nouveau again.I’ll post my results.
You also need to add ‘nomodeset’ to the command line boot parameters. I have it explained on my WebPage at: SuSE 11.3
Just click on ‘Display’ in the jump table at the top.