I have a working and logical solution to the gaming problem, I have explained 
to someone on Mandrakeuser.

The problem is clear by now, see other threads: mode switching doesn't work 
with DRI enabled. 
By the way DRI is enabled if you're using a 16 bit color depth.
But games using DRI are unplayable without it (way too slow) i.e. in higher 
color depths.

What happens is that if you launch a game in fullscreen mode whose default 
resolution is different from th current resolution, it will try to switch its 
default mode and crash the X server.

So you must either force window mode by some command line parameter or by 
editing the config file of the game or force the game to use a different 
resolution from the beginning by one of the two wyas above.

With tuxracer I couldn't find aby command line parameter and the .tuxracer 
directory containing the options file gets created only if you run it 
successfully once. I didn't check if there was some default options file 
somewhere, so here is what I did:

configured X to run in 24 bits color depth (edit XF86Config-4, don't rely on 
XFDrak)
restarted X , aunched tuxracer and quit  ( with some patience since mouse 
movement is awfull).
reconfigured X to 16 bits DefaultColorDepth, restarted X, and modified the 
.tuxracer/options file :
set x_resolution 1024 ( my x resolution)
set y_resolution 768 (  my y resolution)
or alternatively
set fullscreen false (from memory, I'm not on my home linux box right now).
Played tuxracer.

A bit stupid but worked very fine for me and a friend of mine. 
Theoretical advantage: consistent with the understanding of the problem. 

I managed to play gltron in fullscreen as well with command line options to 
set the resolution. ( You may try that first, if it works the rest will 
follow).

General rule: since the X server won't adapt its resolution to the program 
being run, adapt the program's resolution to that of your screen.

Good luck  
good luck

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