The Drunken Lizard Pub

You currently can't gdb a direct rendering OpenGL application from the X Server that it's displaying to. That'll be fixed with DRI2, but the usual symptom until then is that you lock up the server, because gdb catches the signal while the driver's holding the hardware lock and the server can't take ...

One useful thing for debugging these sorts of issues is (if you have a second machine) to ssh in and run the game remotely (env DISPLAY=:0 ./Eschalon_Book_1). Often games will lock up in signal handlers, and this gives you a chance to look at the failure despite not being able to get control back ...

> eschalon_book_1: ../common/dri_bufmgr_fake.c:576: dri_bufmgr_fake_contended_lock_take: Assertion `((&bufmgr_fake->on_hardware)->next == (&bufmgr_fake->on_hardware))' failed

First, you'd probably be a lot happier trying to run this game with current drivers -- kernel from linus master, and libdrm ...