Nouveau

No, I've not moved south. Nouveau is the name of an X.org driver for nVidia cards, that does more than the only other free driver, 'nv'. The main difference being that the former currently breaks more often (which is why it's in Debian Experimental, and not on the road to stable), and that it also supports external video.

Someone blogged a while back about it over on Planet Debian, and while I made a mental note of trying it out at some point, that hadn't immediately happened.

It has now, though. I'm happy to report that I won't need to borrow someone else's laptop for my DebianDay talk. Whee.

Nouveau developers: if I ever meet you in person, I owe you a beer—just as much as I owe beers to those people who wrote a driver for the Broadcom 43xx wireless drivers. Thanks!