Comment 28 for bug 564572

Hm. So, what appears to be happening here - from your picture - is that nouveau doesn't know how to drive your laptop display. I presume the binary nvidia driver works in this case?

If the binary nvidia driver works, it's likely that an mmio-trace of it correctly initialising the display will be useful for fixing this. You can check out the howto here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/MMIOTracing