1st, thanks for taking the time to answer !
>Given the age of your card, it is unlikely
>that the newest Mesa is required.
Well with all respect, given the fact that it is listed in the nouveau wiki
itself I think it is very likely that I need Mesa 7.11 and nothing else to
run the Gallium3D version for my card. Gallium3D has provided the most steady
stream of updates to 3D features. At least from what I have seen in
benchmarks over at Phoronix the last year.
I tried to install mesa-dri-experimental from the Live CD and it somewhat
worked. 3D is working with some quirks (strange slow-downs, some corruptions,
etc).
No matter how "experimental" one considers mesa-dri right now. A few month
ago with Mesa 7.10 I barely got a running 3D accelerated LXDE (Knoppix) and
it fully crashed even with OpenArena after 2 minutes of gaming. With Mesa
7.11 I could play Darkplaces (strongly-enhanced Quake engine) at very
playable framerates (> 60 FPS). The only issues I was aware off was some
clipping at the edge of the level. I wouldn't be surprised if I can run even
Alien Arena on this driver.
The mesa version provided from scratch with Trisquel without installation
worked better than the 7.10 I tested with Knoppix but not as well as the 7.11
I tested with the latest XFCE Aptosid in Live mode. Also 7.11 Gallium behaved
much more stable than the 7.10 experimental DRI lib.
