I’m using an “old” laptop with an nvidia geforce7 mainly as media center connected on my TV. Getting TV-Out working with the nvidia card always was a pain, had to install proprietary driver, pasting chrunks of settings found on random forums to xorg.conf, and repeat until it decide to work. Had to restart X server each time I want to switch from LCD to TV screen.
Recently I upgraded it (actually made fresh install) to Ubuntu Lucid, was prepared to spent hours to get the tvout working again… But I got totally impressed by the new “nouveau” driver installed by default now, TV-Out was working out of the box, I can setup it easily with gnome-display-properties, even the fn+F7 key binding was working to switch display between LCD-only, TV-only or clone TV-LCD.
So I decided to share this good news, thanks to all devs that made that possible! OpenSource: 1, nVidia: 0.