nouveau driver not working for ancient Dell D800

[Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu]

Hi Everyone,

I have an ancient D800 with a mobililty geared Geforce 4 video card.

The laptop is mostly useless, but since it's still working and browsing
the net on it is OK, I wanted to install F17 on it.

In went F17, out went the video. :( The nouveau driver gave me a screen
full of artifacts and a block for a cursor.  Large sections of the
screen were unreadable.

I tried to use the proprietary legacy drivers from Nvidia, but the
installer bombs out.  It used to work on F15 until a kernel update broke
it.  Something changed and that change made it all the way to F17's
kernels.

Does anyone know why the nouveau driver isn't working for me?  Are there
any workarounds?

I'd also appreciate hearing about any workaround's for the proprietary
installer error, if any.

Regards,

Ranbir

-- 
Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu
Linux 3.3.7-1.fc17.x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux 
06:54:37 up 10 days, 19:48, 12 users, load average: 0.63, 2.70, 4.72