Ubuntu 9.04 To Get Nouveau Driver

The Nouveau driver has been in development for several years now but with limited developers that are reverse-engineering NVIDIA's GPUs and there being no public documentation or support from NVIDIA, it has taken quite a while to come up with a reputable open-source driver that supports all of NVIDIA's hardware. Nouveau still doesn't have a stable released version of its 2D DDX or Mesa 3D driver, but development snapshots of it have appeared in Fedora and a few other distributions. With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 next April, a packaged version of Nouveau will finally appear in Ubuntu's repositories.

Hitting the jaunty-changes mailing list this afternoon is an automated message that the Nouveau driver named xserver-xorg-video-nouveau (version: 0.0.10~git+20081028+cea05e1-1) has been accepted into Ubuntu 9.04. This is good news for those not interested in using the obfuscated and feature-limited xf86-video-nv driver or NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver.

Also exciting us are Jaunty updates for Mesa (a Git snapshot as of today), RandR 1.3, and many other updated X.Org pieces. More information on the xserver-xorg-video-nouveau driver for Ubuntu 9.04 can be found on its package page. It doesn't appear that Nouveau will replace xf86-video-nv as the default on new installations, so users will still need to manually make the move.