Ubuntu 11.04 Doesn't Play With Nouveau Gallium3D

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu 11.04 Doesn't Play With Nouveau Gallium3D

For those NVIDIA customers out there who haven't yet tried one of the test releases of Ubuntu 11.04 but are curious to know whether Canonical has enabled the open-source 3D acceleration driver via Gallium3D, they have not enabled the necessary support by default...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTM2Mw

[allquixotic]

Oh, come on. I used Nouveau a year ago on my Mac Mini (which I subsequently sold) with an NV40 based 9000-series IGP (can't remember if it was a 9400M or 9600M). You're telling me that Canonical has no reservations about completely turning around the desktop experience and confusing/shocking thousands of users with the crashy, counterintuitive Unity, but they're too conservative to ship a FOSS driver that worked fine with Compiz a year ago? Huh?

Maybe they should only enable nouveau for certain chipsets; I'd be fine with that. No doubt it's probably way too experimental to run on Fermi. And I doubt it's up to the task of doing heavy 3d as you'd find in Unigine or Trine (no Mesa driver is, for that matter). But Gallium3d drivers have long been proven to have the technical implementation needed to run compositing window managers very well. Nouveau really isn't an exception to this guideline at all, especially if you're running previous-generation Nvidia hardware.

This is disappointing. They are shipping r600g, though, aren't they? AREN'T THEY?

[allquixotic]

Addendum (1 minute edit limit..............): For those who'll jump down my throat and say "Nvidia binary is the only real graphics driver for Nvidia cards", just consider that nothing is stopping the user from installing the binary after their first boot. If that's what they want to do, then by all means. But the first boot (and probably also the second boot, if they perform system updates, install development packages and then reboot to compile the binary against the latest kernel) could easily ship with Nouveau to give them a full Unity composited experience. While I'm sure that Unity haters might actually appreciate not having Unity start by default, it's nevertheless insulting to have that "Sorry, your GPU sucks, you get to use Old Crusty Mode" dialog pop up. I'd rather have Unity and 3d accel than no 3d accel at all. It'd be doubly nice because, in case the Nvidia binary breaks badly on someone's system, they could just revert to Nouveau for basic desktop use + Unity rather than having to completely forego 3d accel in the case of Nvidia binary hvaing problems. If nothing else, the EXA 2d accel provided through Gallium is fast enough to make Firefox a breeze, even with heavy flash videos all over -- I can't say the same about the software rasterizer.

[elanthis]

Oh, come on. I used Nouveau a year ago on my Mac Mini (which I subsequently sold)

I think you're conveniently ignoring the part where the driver has been regressing frequently for various chips, and that each release breaks just as many once-supported chips as it adds.

[Kano]

The experimental mesa package not installed by default, but they can easyly used - even live - did that to try that stupid unity thing...

on a hd install:

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental

live you need 2 command before that:

sudo sed -i 's/^#\s*\(deb\s.*universe\)$/\1/' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update

after that just restart X:

sudo restart gdm

(or kdm for kubuntu)

[bbordwell]

Last time i checked you could enable G3D Nouvuea using jockey ('restricted drivers') in natty, though that was some time ago so maybe they removed it?

[Awesomeness]

Canonical should change Ubuntu's release cycle to be 1 month after Fedora.
Red Hat is working hard on Nouveau to make it at least good enough for GNOME Shell.
If Ubuntu was released 1 month after Fedora, it could pick up all Red Hat developments + 1 month of post-release bugfixes and Canonical could easily ship a Unity-compatible Nouveau driver.

[Vadi]

It works fine. You just selec the classic mode, which has a compatible 2D unity. Common users don't need bleeding-edge video drivers that were just made and are buggy.

[anabelle345]

Thanks for clearing all that up for me. hopefully it will work fine for me too, I shall go and try..