Alack-and-alas, the nvidia installers /etc/modprobe.d/ nvidia-installer-disable-nouveau.conf entry:
# generated by nvidia-installer
blacklist nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
... resulted in blank screens on reboot. I was able to type blind and login on tty1 and issue a 'sudo reboot' command. "Out of the frying pan and into the fire". I booted into the Bodhi instance on another partition and removed the nvidia modprobe.d entry and rebooted back to where I'm at now—Salix running dual monitors as an extended desktop via nouveau (I configured alignment and resolutions with an app called 'zarfy'; strangely my usual tool to use with nouveau, 'arandr', wasn't readily available).
My two monitors are a Samsung 19" LCD, 1280x1024, and a Dell 18" flatpanel CRT, 1600x1200. Unfortunately, the flatpanel CRT displays fuzziness (quite noticable on fonts) under nouveau. All is crisp and clear via both the default driver (when nouveau was disabled) and via the nvdia driver when running it via other distros. In addition to the fuzziness, nouveau is also lacking in VDPAU support* which I require to lighten the load on my monocore Pentium 4 CPU when decoding video playback and compositing and such.
*[I've seen some mention of enabling such for nouveau by extracting firmware from the nvidia driver ... but i'd like to avoid 'ducking down another rabbit hole' ... especially as, even if gpu decoding succeeded, I'd likely still be left with the fuzziness.]
[edit: It's unclear whether the firmware extraction,
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/VideoAcceleration/, would help/hinder nouveau with my particular card (nVidia GeForce 8400 GS). I may try it afterall, just to see.]
Salix 14.1 XFCE running on Dell Dimension 2400, 2.4 GHz P4, 2GB RAM, nVidia GeForce 8400 GS
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