Today two very nice things happened for me in ubuntu jaunty land.
Firstly gnome-games 2.25.5 was packaged as the first in the 2.25 series. I’m happy to see our work for the past months finally reaching the jaunty users. Much has changed “under the hood” in almost all games and some testing would be nice. So if you are on jaunty and have few minutes to spare please consider trying one of the games. If you find a bug please file it in bugzilla. If all works well I would love to hear about it too in a comment here.
The second thing was that I noticed the nouveau driver appeared in the repository. I was curious about the state of the driver and decided to try it out. From what I have read I was not expecting much but I must say I was in for a very pleasant surprise. So far everything has worked wonderfully and the performance is good enough that I don’t feel the need for the binary nvidia driver at all. This is on a 6600GT card running at 1600×1200 with metacity. I have no idea how well it works with compiz or anything 3D but for my use it is perfect. Later I even installed it on my old machine at uni that has a ti4200 card. Works well there too.
Today is a good day 🙂
Your 6600 GT (with its nv4x chip) lies right in the sweet-spot of nouveau support; on my laptop’s 7600Go, also an nv4x, nouveau’s 2d performs noticeably faster than the binary blob. I notice this with GNOME Do, but apparently KDE4 also stresses those codepaths.
There is no (supported) 3d component to the nouveau driver – it’s sitting in the gallium-0.2 branch of mesa’s git repository. There’s an even less supported version, the -ng branches, which do DRI2 and compiz and stuff. That set is highly experimental.
Because of your post I gave Nouveau a try on my Geforce 6600 GT and it works well :). The only problem is that video playback is not tear-free when compositing is activated in metacity. But I think this problem also exists with the nvidia driver. So I’ll keep Nouveau :).
I love the games! Still I believe the print options has room for improvement.
Do you have any plans to work on this before 2.26? Would be great!
kthxbai
I did some testing and found this crash in gnome chess:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=568961
@Mega John:
He he. I’ll see what I can do 🙂
@Martin:
Awesome! Thanks for testing. The sooner we get the bug reports the bigger the chances are of getting them fixed before 2.26.0