As we reported in December, the Nouveau driver is available in Ubuntu 9.04. Unlike Fedora 11 where the Nouveau driver is being enabled by default on NVIDIA hardware, the Nouveau driver will be an after-installation option to Ubuntu users.

A Test Day is planned tomorrow (Thursday 26th) for the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics cards.

As we shared a few days ago, Fedora 13 will provide OpenGL acceleration support for NVIDIA graphics cards via the Nouveau driver when installing the Mesa DRI experimental drivers package. There is finally 3D acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards using an open-source driver on Linux without having to depend upon NVIDIA's official binary 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.

While there is now DRM support in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel for the Nouveau driver that carries the bits for kernel mode-setting, 2D (EXA) acceleration, and other fundamental functions on NVIDIA graphics processors, the Gallium3D driver still is incomplete. However, a new Mesa DRI driver has emerged for Nouveau that provides *working* 3D support for older NVIDIA hardware.

The Nouveau driver, the X.Org project designed to provide a open-source NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux with 2D/3D/Video acceleration that's developed by cleanly reverse-engineering NVIDIA's binary driver, is about to get promoted in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

The nouveau project has done it! Finally, an open source 3D driver for NVIDIA video cards has arrived and will ship with Fedora 13. Let's take a look (including a few benchmarks).

With the forthcoming release of Fedora 11, Red Hat has made the bold (but wise) decision of replacing xf86-video-nv as the default open-source NVIDIA driver with the Nouveau driver instead.

One of the slated features for Ubuntu 10.04 early on in its development cycle was support for the Nouveau graphics driver on NVIDIA hardware since it's much better than the xf86-video-nv driver mess and has a much brighter future, which is especially important with 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" being a Long-Term Support (LTS) release.