I See Dead Code

Given the ever-shifting pain with the Linux Nvidia drivers (lockups, no Suspend-to-Disk, shaky Suspend-to-RAM, bad 2D performance in FF3/KDE 4.1), I finally gave nouveau a try on my ThinkPad T61, since a package entered the Debian repositories.

Upsides

For such an early release and given my kind-of new and kind-of exotic hardware (Quadro NVS 140M, a G86), it worked quite well. XRandR 1.2 is a breeze, and 2D performance was ok. No hard lockups, either.

So, in short terms, what does work:

• XRandR 1.2
• External Output
• Somehow fast 2D

Downsides

I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I think the picture quality on the VGA port was lower than with the Nvidia drivers (I have an external screen with a 1680×1050 resolution). Also, video overlay doesn’t work yet on the newest cards, so the video output was very grainy.

I also saw a lot of wrongly rendered pixmaps in FF3. No real showstopper, but also not very nice. Also, suspend/resume didn’t work yet.

I have changed back to the Nvidia driver for now.