Awesome! I find that running nouveau right now, although I don't
currently get compiz on the particular hardware I'm running on my
laptop, is worth it just to not have the crazy crashes and odd kernel
behaviors that sometimes happen with the proprietary driver. It's
certainly a personal choice, but I'm amazed at the speed at which Ben
Skeggs and other nouveau folks are pushing the software further. In
one release it's gone from very tetchy to rock-solid (plus full KMS
goodness) on my NVidia 8400GS M hardware.
Paul
I switched from nouvea to the proprietary drivers (on Ubuntu) largely
because nouveau didn't handle suspend / resume as well, which is
critical for my daily use. Any reports that it has gotten better on
that front reently?
Tres.
--
===================================================================
Tres Seaver +1 540-429-0999 tse...@palladion.com
Palladion Software "Excellence by Design" http://palladion.com
I used to use the NVidia proprietary driver on Fedora 11 for precisely
the same reason. However, the work that Fedora contributors like Ben
Skegss have done on the driver have made it work much, much better in
Fedora 12. I can now suspend/resume and hibernate/thaw properly with
Rawhide (pre-Fedora 12) on my NVidia-based Dell XPS M1330 laptop.
We do ask for people to test our early pre-releases to see how things
work and report bugs. You can download the Fedora 12 Beta here:
http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease
However, *psst*, you can download the latest nightly compose of the
pre-F12 Fedora Desktop Live image here:
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/desktop/
That's a Live image you can burn to CD or (even better) write to USB
using the livecd-tools or LiveUSB Creator. The Ubuntu live USB writer
I've seen is unfortunately not quite up to the task of making live
images from most things non-Ubuntu, although the Fedora one does
actually work with a number of distributions including Ubuntu. If you
google 'LiveUSB Creator' or 'liveusb-creator' you'll find the right
one at the top of the list.
Anyhow, if you pull the ISO file and write it to a CD or USB you can
test how things work nowadays. Although of course hardware differs
and YMMV, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. And no pesky kernel
or X crashes, or other weird behavior caused by closed source blecch.
Another reason that pushing for better free software is always a
bigger win for users than scotch-taping things and praying. :-)
--
Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/
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irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
I've never used the proprietary driver, but I can report that the
nouveau driver suspends and resumes properly on my MacBook Pro running
Fedora Rawhide (what will be Fedora 12).
-Jared
Forgot to include this last bit of full disclosure -- in my system
there is one lingering problem that causes the gamma of the display
not be reset properly on resume:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=523190
I have to run 'xgamma -gamma 1.0' on resume to fix this problem more
often than not, which is a pain but at least I don't have the
unpredictable pain of the NVidia proprietary driver (with its
inexplicable kernel and X crashes).