Having seen Nouveau, the open source 3-D drivers for Nvidia cards, mentioned in Linux Weekly News and recalling that I wanted to help work on them myself, I decided to use some of my free time to give it a try.

So I followed the instructions, and then got a compilation error. The driver could not find the linux/config.h header. Per the advice of someone on Freenode's #nouveau, I changed it to linux/autoconf.h, and that made it compile. (I'm using the latest -rc kernel). I later encountered some problems with getting the driver insmod'ed but these were also resolvable.

Then I restarted X to run it with it. It worked. I encountered a problem with the fact that in KDE and multitple workspaces and .jpg files as background that cover the whole screen, then I get tiling behaviour in the background when switching workspaces that doesn't exist with "nv". What I mean is that the redrawing of the new background is visible (left-to-right, top-to-bottom). The people on #nouveau said that it is planned that this will be resolved independently of Nouveau.

I'm planning to continue using this driver, and also potentially help by writing code for it. La revolution lives on! (or in our case la nouveau-lution lives on!)

By the way, this was the first time I used git, because that's the version control system that Nouveau is using. It was not a very painful experience and I survived to tell the tale. ;-)