Is the nouveau driver the replacement for the "nv" open source driver for Nvidia graphics cards?

PS Link: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/.

It is the same one.

Thank you for this information.

Actually, this is incorrect. The 'nouveau' driver is NOT the same as the 'nv' driver. The 'nv' driver is maintained by an nVidia employee, and is generally fairly poor, feature-wise. It generally doesn't have good 2D acceleration, or dual-head support. 'nv' is pretty much a stop-gap for installing the nvidia binary driver or for those who don't want to run a binary blob and don't need full hardware support.

The 'nouveau' driver is a community project, forked from the 'nv' driver when the 'nv' maintainer didn't accept some patches. The nouveau project aims to replace the nvidia binary driver; it aims to support everything the binary driver does - dual-head, 3d acceleration, suspend/resume, etc. It's currently experimental, but provides very good 2D acceleration (better than the nvidia binary driver in my experience) and good dual-head features (again, better than the binary blob for my uses). 3D and suspend/resume are both highly experimental.

Thank you for this detailled answer, which helped me a lot.