Anyone tried the Fedora nouveau driver for GF 8xxx mobile cards?

I have heard that the latest NV open-source driver does not support the 8xxx mobile cards yet, or at least the 8600M GT. Not having received my laptop yet, I was wondering if anyone has tried the nouveau drivers shipped with Fedora 7 (Moonshine) ? It seems like all the work-arounds involve the vesa drivers; however, the nouveau drivers are supposed to support full 3D acceration and NV-specific functionality.

From Fedora 7 Release notes:

Has anyone tried this out? I would very much appreciate any feedback on the drivers, their compatibilty, and ease of use. Having never owned a nVidia card within Linux, I have no idea if this would work.

Thanks in advance!

 

It may work, but if you don't have an attachment to the Open Source everywhere philosophy, I'm sure NVidia's native drivers work very well, even though they aren't open source.

 

Well the problem is, from what I have read over on the Sager forums, the 8600M GT is not supported in any form by the NV drivers, and that the users are forced to default to vesa. I was just wondering if this would be a viable alternative to vesa and if anyone has had any experience working with this driver.

 

That's probably true. It may be an alternative, but you still won't get good 3D acceleration with them. You won't even get 3D acceleration if it worked with the nv driver. If you are looking for good features, I'd recommend nvidia's official drivers. If you want open-source, try the nouveau drivers. But vesa isn't going to be much worse than the nv drivers in general.

 

The NV drivers are not the official nVidia drivers, in case you didn't know.

But either way, I suggest you try out the official nVidia Linux drivers. There are some pretty good workarounds known on the net to get them working on the new 8xxxM series cards. If you want open source drivers, you should probably just go with Intel graphics. An nVidia card with open source drivers won't perform a whole lot better than an Intel card with official open source (well, mostly) drivers.

 

The workarounds are usually required during installation because X will try to drive the 8600GT and its brothers using the NV drivers and that does not work.

Once the OS is installed, you can use the latest drivers provided by nVidia to drive a 8600GT without much problem. I've used Envy to install them on my Ubuntu installation. The only issue I have is that sleep and hibernate do not work well with the current drivers. That's an issue that nVidia knows about and plans to fix for the next driver release.

 

I can comfirm that the nv driver, as included on the Fedora 7 release DVD will not work with Geforce 8 8400M cards, which would also mean the 8600 would not work. Vesa is the required workaround, until you get the nvidia drivers installed.