On the particular machine in question I have two (2) installs of Trusty i386. On the second install (which has not been updated for a while) nouveau is working just swell so there must have been something borked during the last update (on the prior install). I will now update/upgrade this install on the same system and see what gives.
edit :
btw .. this current was orignally a xubuntu install with Ubuntu Unity desktop installed.
Code:
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: GT218 [GeForce 210]
vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: a2
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=nouveau latency=0
resources: irq:49 memory:92000000-92ffffff memory:80000000-8fffffff memory:90000000-91ffffff ioport:2000(size=128) memory:93080000-930fffff
*-multimedia