I have tried everything I can think of to install the nouveau driver, which is the only one I can trust on my system with the Geforce 8800 card I received as a gift. I tried Nvidia direct download drivers before and it was impossible to alter the screen resolution and the "fixes"/patches were not able to correct that fact. And removing it led to my having to reinstall my system both times. So I'm done with those.

I realized that I could use the nouveau driver when I realized that the second OS on my dual boot system worked perfectly with it. It has the nouveau driver onboard. That OS is Ubuntu 10.04, btw. Also the system I want to install this driver on requires a screen resolution of 1280x960. The Ubuntu is at 1280x1024 for some reason, with the same monitor, it works.

How do I get my stable debian system to download the xserver-xorg-video-nouveau and meet all its dependencies without breaking my system? I even tried reloading Synaptic with the highest available software, but I still could not get the driver to install. What am I doing wrong? Is it just impossible to install this particular driver on my system? And if there's an old version of it I am willing to try that too. Please help.

If you are running Debian stable (6.0/Squeeze) then nouveau is installed by default.

I thought that it was already on board too, and even tried to use it, but it's not there. I have Dreamlinux 3.5 (Debian 5.0) and only xserver-xorg-video-nv is installed. What can I do, if anything?

Debian 5.0 (oldstable, not stable) doesn't have the nouveau driver, and it simply doesn't support it. Update to 6.0 if you want to use them.

Thank you! I will definitely try that, once I find out how. But first I need to know if it's possible to update Dreamlinux 3.5 from Debian 5.0 to Debian 6.0 without breaking my system? The strange thing is the engage admin and Dreamlinux control panel both stop working if libgtk2-ruby libgtk2-ruby1.8 are uninstalled. Does 6.0 even use those?

I have never used any other distro long enough for updating the kernel to be an issue, so I'm not certain what the effect would be, and I don't want to give up Dreamlinux. I can't even find the engage or DCP pkgs for download anywhere, so this greatly concerns me. If I screw up I cannot reinstall them; I'd have to start from scratch.

Any advice would be appreciated.

As you can see here, DreamLinux 4.0 is currently in it's beta-phase. I don't know if it is safe to upgrade now, but as long as I can see, version 4.0 should support the nouveau-driver.

I've heard about 4.0, but I haven't tried it yet. I will download and try the live disk, if it works with my video card I will install. Thank you very much for your help! I appreciate it.