I don't know if this has been asked before, but has Blender been tested
under the Nouveau driver? If so, what are the results? For those who are not
familiar, the Nouveau driver is a FOSS driver for Nvidia graphics cards.
They do not officially support 3D, but basic OpenGL is supported on most
mode
In short, yes it does work but I can't speak for more advanced
features like GLSL shaders or VBO's.
I ran the Nouveau drivers for a while to fix a reported bug:
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&group_id=9&aid=24339&atid=498
>From my experience the main problem is copying the depth