Comment 64 for bug 626974

The nouveau hardware accelerated 3-d driver works fairly well in Maverick on my GeForce 4 MX 4000 card. Googleearth works pretty much as it did with the proprietary driver, including 3-d buildings, except that when the view moves close to horizontal and the horizon comes into view, the photographic view of the earth sometimes suddenly disappears. Otherwise, the 3-d effect works fine. Stellarium works at the same speed as with the proprietary driver, but the sunlight illumination doesn't appear on the planets (i.e., they appear in shadow from all sides). Foobillard billiards simulation game works fine except that there's an annoying moving shadow pattern on the table top. I haven't had any crashes.

I can't turn on desktop effects--I get the message that I need the proprietary driver.

According to the nouveau website, if you've got an nvidia card with a nv30 or later chip and want to try the 3-d hardware accelerated driver, you need nouveau_dri.so driver, which is in the libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental package in maverick universe. If you've got a nv20 or earlier chip, you need nouveau_vieux_dri.so, which seems to have been removed from the maverick repositories before final release, but I got it from the xorg-edgers ppa maverick repository. It's in the libgl1-mesa-dri package (not the experimental package). All I did was add the repository, update the package, shutdown the power and reboot.

In order to determine whether you need the nouveau_dri or the nouveau_vieux_dri driver, consult the table at: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/CodeNames