Debian Squeeze: Nouveau runs with 2.6.32-5
To run Nvidia display hardware on Debian GNU/Linux – really not a minor issue even for the end user – always was quite inconvenient: the proprietary driver is full-featured and mature but unavailable in the first install pack nor in the repository naturally due to license conflicts and furthermore must be reinstalled after each kernel update. Nvidia has provided also a limited free version of their Linux driver which was included into Debian (nvidia-glx), but a couple of months ago the company announced that they are not going to maintain it any longer (see here). After that the end user has to look out for another solution if he has used this driver so far. If able to give up acceleration and 3D support for Google Earth etc. the simple VESA driver (xserver-xorg-video-nv) is a reliable alternative, but users which are employing Nvidia should really take a look at times the new Nouveau driver. Nouveau was created through reverse engineering and is going to be a full fledged free driver for Nvidia hardware. There was some struggle about including Nouveau, but Linus Thorvalds finally accepted it for the experimental 2.6.33 kernel (see here). The X server driver (xserver-xorg-video-nouveau) became available a couple of days before for Testing and since the latest update to kernel 2.6.32-5 also the corresponding kernel module (/etc/X11/xorg.conf must contain Driver “nouveau” instead of nv or nvidia). So now Debian Squeeze (which is 6.0 and is planned to get frozen in August, see here) has finally caught up to Ubuntu which made Nouveau available already for Karmic Koala (see here). The driver is still marked as experimental but seems to work already pretty fine.
Addition: the inclusion of the Nouveau into the kernel makes problems for the proprietary Nvidia driver which yields to a “kernel module load error” during installation because the Nouveau kernel module blocks that. On the net there are a lot of tips to add rdblacklist=nouveau to the Grub configuration etc. (mostly on pages towards Fedora), but on my Debian Squeeze it just worked to add nomodeset to /boot/grub/grub.cfg at the end of the line which begins with linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-amd64 (don’t forget to do a grub-install after that) – that prevents the Nouveau module to be loaded already during boot time so that the Nvidia driver could be installed properly before firing up the X server (without export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.3 the installation breaks with failed compiler version check, furthermore the proper linux-headers-2.6 have to be installed).