I had suddenly no longer any image with xv (blue screen) or xvidix (green screen) with a radeon 9600 pro and xorg. The only strange thing I found in the logs was an error about automatically detected VideoRAM. Xorg was guessing the card had 128MB while it actually have 256MB. Adding in VideoRam 262144 in xorg.conf did the trick.

Weird, isn't it?

Playing video with GNU/Linux is still really messy.

Update: it's surely a good day to find bugs. Previously, I reported linux-image-2.6.12-1-686: bug #334843: Oops suddenly appearing after a video card change and today, I had to try to trace the cause of this bug in order to check why suddenly ardour/jackd sound output was all fucked up. I guessed it was due to the fact that I switched back to 2.6.8 due to bug #334843. And I was right, actually the sound is clean only with 2.6.12... and it was hddtemp that was killing the kernel while doing a scan of devices -- quite odd that linux was killed due to a scan of a DVD device without temperature probe, quite odd that this occurs only with a given video card. I posted a report against hddtemp, not yet in the online debian database though... Well, I'm not sure I should mention jackd issue with 2.6.8...