Comment 4 for bug 1080808

@Bryce: I started having problems around Quantal Beta2, Unity, and found that moving to the nVidia proprietary driver would either eliminate the problem, or make it very rare (I did not experience this issue at all with the proprietary driver). But the proprietary driver sucks in terms of setting multiple monitors -- I could not set them up unless by trying again and again (which sounds very much like the definition of insanity). So I went back to Nouveau, and found that KDE would survive longer. So I moved to KDE.

Then -- last week -- I upgraded to Raring. There I simply cannot use the 3.7.0 kernel; the 3.5.0-19 suffers the same issues on Unity, but mostly works on KDE.

So, a summary (*NOTE* this seems to happen with some, but not all, nVidia cards. In my case it is a GT218 [NVS 3100M] rev a2):

* nouveau on Quantal (Unity) fails at least once a day with the errors above; failure requires machine to be power-cycled; no local access is possible
* nouveau on Quantal (KDE) is usable; similar failures are mostly observed when logging in, and require a power-cycle
* nouveau on Raring (Unity or KDE) fails during login, *always*. Raring works if booted with kernel 3.5.0-19

I will check the upstream kernels.