How to make the nouveau driver actually to work

[kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu]

Very likely, this is a small problem and I do not know the right trick to 
use to get past it:

I have followed the instructions for building the drm module and the 
nouveau module and the nouveau X11 driver. Now, when I actually want to 
test it, the following things occur.

Upon starting X I get a black screen with a little watch face in the 
middle. Things never get past that point, no matter how long I wait. The 
only thing to do is Cntrl-Alt-Backspace to kill it.

Log files do not seem to show any obvious problem occurring; they look 
pretty much the same as they do if X is working properly, but with 
"nouveau" in all of the places where one would see "nv".

The card is supposed to be supported just fine. It is not a new one, but 
is an old GeForce2, with 64M of RAM on it. Here is what lspci has to say 
about it

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX 
400] (rev b2)

What am I missing? As I said, it must be obvious but I do not know.

Theodore Kilgore