When Fedora 10 was released, one of the first things I did was enable nouveau as my graphics driver – nv was horribly slow on my Dell, and I didn’t want the pain of the proprietary drivers. Needless to say, it didn’t immediately work: it didn’t want to play with my 1920×1050 panel and I got big black bars on either side of the screen. It took someone on #nouveau all of about five minutes to give me a patch to fix the problem, and a hop-skip-jump later I’d recompiled the driver and the display was great.

Since that time, nouveau has been coming on leaps and bounds. The xrandr support is great – I use it for presentations all the time – and aside from the odd bit of corruption or colours going wonky, it has been fine. So when nouveau test day for Fedora 11 came around I was excited to see how much more progress had been made, and to see if I could help with testing at all.

On the progress front, it’s obvious a lot of work has been done. Whether or not nouveau is ready to be the default I don’t know, but on my hardware it’s working great. The support for video is better, there is no corruption I could see, and there are the beginnings of a working multi-head setup.

What impressed me most was the amount of work AdamW et al. put into arranging the test day. With explicit use-cases, readily available Live CDs and people on IRC, it was extremely easy to get into. Hopefully the developers feel the various bug reports are more worthwhile than overwhelming 🙂