I'm drifting towards pulling my LMDE install back up and bashing my head against that for a while to get the nvidia drivers working; the standard flavor Mint I'm on is showing massive signs of problems due to its /home being on a 30 gig partition (I have a weakness for WINE and games, so huge downloads happen fairly frequently). Not looking forward to that as it's the sort of terminal work I'm least familiar with, and the nouveau drivers are an enormous pain in the ass to switch out.