Currently, because we don't ship the nouveau 3D component by default, users of nVidia hardware will get the classic GNOME 2D experience on Natty LiveCDs. Worse, it's difficult to enable the binary drivers on the LiveCD.
Since nVidia hardware is common this means a large subset of our users won't be able to test Unity without a physical install. As I see it, there are two ways to fix this, each with their own fun problems: 1) Ship Nouveau 3D in libgl1-mesa-dri, so 3D works out of the box 2) Make it easy to use the binary drivers on the LiveCD. Option (1) has the problem that upstream aren't interested in 3D bugs that don't have patches attached, and we don't have the manpower to invest. Most problems we'd encounter would need to be worked-around with some form of blacklisting. Option (2) has the problem that it's quite difficult to unload a kms driver, and few people actually try it, so it's poorly tested. This also involves extra LiveCD-specific work. It seems that we can do either nothing, (1), (2), or both (1) and (2). Both options seem to me to be independently valuable - I think it would be useful for users to be able to try out the binary drivers on a LiveCD, and it would obviously be nice to support 3D by default for nVidia users. I think that shipping nouveau 3D is probably reasonable, but something we should happily back out if it turns out there are significant problems. I also plan to quickly investigate how precisely how difficult getting the binary drivers installable on a LiveCD would be. What opinions or prior investigations do people hold? Is this reasonable?
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