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Nouveau is the X11 driver which should -- at a later stage -- offer 3D acceleration. Currently we are working on 2D acceleration and deobfuscating the source we inherited from the X11 nv driver.

Installing Nouveau from Debian Experimental

The Nouveau drivers are now available from Debian experimental. The term "experimental" here refers to the distribution of Debian (such as "stable", "testing", etc).

Installing these drivers requires compilation to ensure that the generated "drm" module is compiled against your kernel correctly. If you would like to try them:

  1. Ensure you are using Debian sid/unstable.
  2. Add experimental sources to your /etc/apt/sources.list.
  3. Run the following commands to prepare your system to compile 
     sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install module-assistant
 sudo module-assistant update
  4. Run the following command to compile and install drm: 
     sudo DRM_MODULES=nouveau module-assistant auto-install drm
  5. Now we have installed drm, we can install the Nouveau drivers themselves: 
     sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
  6. Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and specify the nouveau driver in the Device section.
  7. Restart X. You will need to remove the binary nvidia kernel module.

Editing your xorg.conf may be as simple as the replacing nvidia or nv with nouveau; nouveau won’t be chosen automatically over nv yet in Debian.

If you find bugs related to the Debian packaging, please report the problem with the Debian bug tracker.

Installing Nouveau from source

Make sure that CONFIG_DRM is not set in your kernel configuration (Linux) or else inserting the kernel modules will fail! Now, if you want to try out nouveau from source, please follow these steps carefully:

  1. Install Xorg 7.1 - Versions prior to this won't work due to difference in some internal structures. Read the Xorg Modular Developer's Guide for help with building from source.

  2. Install the required toolchain and linux-headers-2.6. Alternatively you can install the nouveau-build-deps_1.0_all.deb Debian package, which only contains dependencies on the required packages. 

     dpkg -i nouveau-build-deps_1.0_all.deb # will complain about the dependencies
 apt-get -f install # should install them along with the package
    In case you'll want to deinstall all the packages afterwards you'll be able to: 
     apt-get --auto-remove remove nouveau-build-deps
  3. Download the drm git tree. Use 
     git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/drm/
    to obtain the current sources.
  4. Now compile it via: 
     cd drm
 ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr && make
 sudo make install
 cd linux-core && make
    to create the kernel modules.

    Alternatively you can use checkinstall to cleanly install and remove the created files via debian mechanisms. If you have installed the checkinstall package: 

     sudo checkinstall --pkgname nouveau-drm -D --install=no make install
 sudo dpkg --force-overwrite -i nouveau-drm*.deb # this will overwrite files in libdrm2 and libdrm-dev

    Note that both the sudo make install and the alternative sudo checkinstall... commands will overwrite files that ship with the libdrm2 and libdrm-dev packages. Thus if you want to restore back to previous state after you'll need to reinstall libdrm2 and libdrm-dev.

    checkinstall creates quick and dirty packages. If you wish to introduce yourself to the proper way of Debian packaging, you can start with Debian New Maintainers' Guide, available in the Debian repositories as "maint-guide[-language]". See also DebianPackages.

  5. Make sure that neither drm nor nvidia (binary version) kernel drivers are loaded. Use 

     lsmod | egrep "(drm|nvidia)"
    to find out if the modules are loaded and then unload them using: 
     rmmod nvidia
 rmmod drm
    should you still have them loaded.

  6. Now insert your drm module, followed by the nouveau module: 

     insmod drm.ko
 insmod nouveau.ko
    Using 
     insmod drm.ko debug=1
    would spam your syslog with some more messages, which could be useful for us.

  7. Now edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use the nouveau driver: Change the Driver line in Section "Device" to Driver "nouveau"

  8. leave the directory drm and pull the Xorg nouveau driver: 

     git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/nouveau/xf86-video-nouveau/

  9. Switch into xf86-video-nouveau and compile: 

     ./autogen.sh && make

    and copy the nouveau_drv.so to the driver directory of Xorg: 

     cp src/.libs/nouveau_drv.so /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers
  10. Now start Xorg and run for cover

You can also check this pages:
Ebuilds for Gentoo
Fedora packages

Problems

Q: I can't install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau, it says something like "linux-nouveau-modules not available"
A: Follow the "Installing Nouveau from Debian Experimental" instructions above; you must compile the drm modules which "Provide:" linux-nouveau-modules.

Q: I can't insert the drm module, it says something with "duplicated symbol"
A: Make sure that you haven't set CONFIG_DRM in your kernel config

Q: Inserting nouveau.ko fails with "invalid module format"
A: drm.ko needs to be inserted first.

Q: Compiling xf86-video-nouveau fails with "No nouveau_drm.h found".
A: Make sure that nouveau_drm.h lies in a path which can be found by your compiler. Best thing is to put it in the same directory as the headers of the other X11 drivers. Or add your include path to the makefile.