High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In computing, nouveau is a software project aiming to develop free software drivers for Nvidia graphics cards, by reverse engineering Nvidia`s current proprietary drivers for Linux. This project by X.Org Foundation and freedesktop.org was initially based on the obfuscated 2D-only free and open-source "nv" driver. The name of the project refers to the fact that "nouveau" means "new" in French. The name was suggested by the original author`s IRC client`s French autoreplace feature which suggested the word "nouveau" when he typed "nv".