Not too long ago, I wrote about the ATI drivers for Linux. Today, an open source nvidia project, Nouveau, is thrust into the limelight. Phoronix's Michael Larabel provides us with a first look of the open source graphics driver.

The Nouveau Wiki clearly states that the current driver is intended only for developers. There is still plenty of work ahead before this driver can become usable for desktop users. Once the driver is working, it is intended to support all NVIDIA graphics cards -- from the Riva 128 NV03 to the GeForce 8800GTX G80. The driver also supports NVIDIA's Quadro workstation series. The NVIDIA graphics cards with the best support at this time are the NV20/30/40 series. While no GPU has complete support yet, among the many features being worked on are vertex format, texturing, lighting, buffer clears, blending modes, screen clipping, object clipping, DMA, TCL, vertex shaders, and fragment shaders.

That clears it - not for the faint-hearted. :) However, Linux users are often living on the bleeding edge of technology, so go get the drivers, test it and provide feedback to the community.

[image courtesy of Locutis]