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After latest updates the system start shows a message:

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The display driver has been automatically switched to 'nouveau'.
Reason: the proprietary driver for nvidia was not found.

In the -dev mailing list it is described as:

checking in dmesg - I see that the nouveau driver grabs the card before
the nvidia driver can - but trying to remove the nouveau driver wants to
remove over 800 packages!

Same problem - HP Mini311 + NVIDIA ION

This is from the nouveau wiki:

Uninstall Nouveau / Reinstall previous driver

The nouveau installation process involves updating the drm kernel module, adding a new kernel module (nouveau.ko) and a new X module (nouveau_drv.so).

The drm kernel module is needed to get new features still not merged in upstream kernels and it shouldn't be a problem when using the previous drivers you had installed, as neither nv nor nvidia use it. Do disable Nouveau KMS, if you used it.

The new nouveau.ko and nouveau_drv.so files don't overwrite any previous existing files, so you just need to rmmod the nouveau driver and restore your previous xorg.conf.

Libdrm installation will overwrite existing files. Libdrm Makefile should offer an uninstall command: make uninstall, after which you can reinstall the distribution packaged libdrm.

If you were previously using the free nv driver

Change your xorg.conf to use 'nv' as driver again and restart X.

If you were previously using the binary driver by nvidia

To get the binary driver back you edit xorg.conf and either copy NVIDIA's proprietary libglx.so back or run the installer again.

I have a meeting all afternoon, so I won't be able to try to rerun the installer from nvidia, but will try tonight and report back.

Now, reading the list I understand it is actually a feature, not a bug

Making nouveau jump in prevents users landing on a text login in case an updated x11-server does not match the current (installed) version of a proprietary nvidia driver.

Which makes me hope that we will have an update of either one soon - I'm not very fond of the nouveau driver, it shows weakness in video display (especially with high resolution).

Well, at least packagers are consequent, they don't stop breaking one thing per day!
After the change to nouveau (which left everything else in my Gnome session working ok) the next update half an hour ago did the rest:
1. graphics still down to nouveau
2. wifi totally hosed (not possible to get a connection, although all is set)
3. On top of this the system now boots into "Gnome 3 Compatibility mode", telling me my graphic system is not able to display Gnome 3 (which it was doing fine before the update).
4. Switching to a console seems to make my keyboard type in black on black: I type a command without any letters showing but the command is carried out. I type only a few meaningless chars and hit enter: bash answers with "bash: asdf: command not found"

I guess I'll call it a day...

Wow that's worse than my system! I am definately seeing wifi weirdness, but can still connect. I have to attempt several manual connections though. Also seeing lots of disk activity which is slowing everything down, and the power manager may not be working quite right (but that may just be me adjusting to KDE 4.8).

The 'feature' gets worse though....I did try to install the drivers direct from NVIDIA. You have to do it with no X server running.
After accepting the license, I got a message that nouveau was detected as installed and that there is a basic incompatibility between the two. Nouveau must be disabled and maybe manually. It then attempts to remove nouveau from the modprobe, but warns that this may not work on all distros. Tells you that if you want to revert, delete /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-disable-nouveau.conf or something like that.

Then it says to reboot and try again.

I rebooted and the OS did this:

Making nouveau jump in prevents users landing on a text login in case an updated x11-server does not match the current (installed) version of a proprietary nvidia driver.

automatically and reinstalled nouveau.

It continued booting right back into nouveau and KDM.
So it seems like an endless loop. I guess you could boot to console, remove nouveau, reboot to console install NVIDIA drivers, reboot normally?
But really that is pretty steep for NVIDIA users!

I also agree that nouveau isn't as good with the colors and vibrance, and I have concerns about how well it will handle HDMI video and audio out (though I haven't tried this yet).

Resolved one of the issues: wifi works again after I disabled networkmanager.

After todays updates and again configuring graphics & reboot the proprietary nvidia driver was accepted and "normal" Gnome 3 came up.
Wifi was gone again but reconfiguring (without networkmanager) brought it up again.
Input on text console are in white on black again.

Ready for next breakages.