-nouveau now set as the default driver for Nvidia hardware

[Aurélien Naldi]

On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 10:45 PM, Bryce Harrington <bryce at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> After several months working on testing and integration, last night we
> officially transitioned from -nv to -nouveau.  If you own nvidia
> hardware and are not using the proprietary drivers, you will be affected
> by this change.
[...]
> To achieve this, we are using nouveau code backported from the 2.6.33
> kernel via the linux-backports-modules package, as the 2.6.32 did not
> have usable nouveau KMS code.  We are still evaluating and experimenting
> with how best to integrate and support this code, so may make some
> further adjustments in coming weeks.
[...]

Hi,

and first congrats, it looks like great news!
Unfortunately for me, my only system with a nvidia graphic card is a
PPC (G5 macpro) and the linux-backport module package is not available
for PPC. I used it on another old PC a while ago (on karmic) with much
better results than the nv driver and thus hope to get better 2D
performance (even web browsers feel slow right now) on the PPC system
I'm currently using.
I know it isn't a supported arch anymore so I tried grabbing the
source and building it, which fails as the compile scripts are
tailored for supported-archs-kernels only. The package
nouveau-kernel-source doesn't build either due to some kernel API
change, after small code update (sorry, I lost the bug number here) it
does compile but shows a colorful and unusable screen. This version is
pretty old and the same bug reports mentions it will probably be
updated soon.

As nouveau is also supposed to work on PPC, I'd like to know if the
upcoming changes will enable easy installation or at least compilation
on this architecture. If I missed some explanation on how to do that,
please update my pointers ;)

Best regards.

--
Aurélien Naldi