Bug#699214: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau: Fonts are not displayed

[Julio Merino <julio+debian@meroh.net>]

Package: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
Version: 1:1.0.1-4
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

* What led up to the situation?

I installed Debian testing powerpc64 on a PowerMac G5 with a NVIDIA
Corporation NV34 [GeForce FX 5200 Ultra] (rev a1) graphics card (as
reported by lspci).

Running the X server results in no fonts being displayed at all, with
the exception of the default fixed font in xterm.  Something as simple
as "xterm -fa Monospace" also shows the problem (a blank window with
a cursor but no visible text), which denotes that the issue is quite
"down the dependency chain".

* What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
  ineffective)?

I uninstalled the xserver-xorg-video-nouveau package, to force the X
server to fallback to fbdev, and the issue went away.  The fonts are
now properly displayed.  But, of course, this is just a workaround and
not a solution; I'd like to use the real driver.

I also attempted to downgrade libxft and libfreetype6 to older versions
(libfreetype6_2.4.2-2.1+squeeze4_powerpc.deb and
libxft2_2.1.14-2_powerpc.deb) but this did not help.

The graphics driver seems to be at fault here.

* Logs and screenshot depicting the problem:

http://www.NetBSD.org/~jmmv/g5-no-fonts/Xorg.log-with-nouveau
http://www.NetBSD.org/~jmmv/g5-no-fonts/Xorg.log-without-nouveau
http://www.NetBSD.org/~jmmv/g5-no-fonts/dmesg
http://www.NetBSD.org/~jmmv/g5-no-fonts/screenshot.jpg

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: powerpc (ppc64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-powerpc64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968) (ignored: LC_ALL set to C)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages xserver-xorg-video-nouveau depends on:
ii  libc6                                  2.13-37
ii  libdrm2                                2.4.40-1~deb7u2
ii  libudev0                               175-7
ii  xserver-xorg-core [xorg-video-abi-12]  2:1.12.4-4

Versions of packages xserver-xorg-video-nouveau recommends:
ii  libgl1-mesa-dri  8.0.5-3

xserver-xorg-video-nouveau suggests no packages.