A Test Day is planned tomorrow (Thursday 26th) for the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. This is a Fedora test day due to the inclusion of nouveau as the default driver in Fedora 11, but will be of interest to users of all distributions, as most are likely to switch to nouveau as their default driver in future, and all the work done by Fedora will be contributed to the upstream development of the driver. i586 and x86-64 live CD images are available, so anyone can easily help out with the testing without any kind of permanent changes to your machine.
With things like OpenCL, OpenGL and accelerated graphics everywhere things like GEM, Gallium3d etc are very important.
Maybe they will only work for integrated graphic chips for some time, but that is like 90% of devices/PCs out there.
This test day is focusing on 2D stuff. 3D support in nouveau is still fairly raw and won’t be enabled by default for F11.
2D however seems to work like a dream. Running recent git version of Nouveau on PowerPC and it’s not only a dozen times faster than Nv but it also fixed a screen-shifting bug that was visible with Nv.
I still hope they get 3D going soon as there are no proprietary nvidia drivers for PPC :/
You ain’t kidding. I got me a nice dual G5 that I have no intention of replacing anytime soon but with Leopard being the end of the line from Apple (intel only Snow Leopard? Really?), Linux on PPC is something I’ve been tracking for years now.
Honestly, I can’t wait for decent video drivers and gnash/swfdec to mature to the point where I can achieve function parity with Linux on this puppy. That would be a happy day indeed.