It's a pitty, I just got the DRI working with 2.4.20-pre9-ben0 (the newer 2.4.23 just crashes at 16bpp) but after playing a while with some 3D rendering (worked OK for a while) the box crashed badly and after a few seconds some bad harddrive noise occured... and I quicky power it off and was happy everything is still OK -- looks like better not using DRI with r128.
gxlgears worked fine. I then was running my GXSM software to view some 3D surfaces (I never had problems unsing MESA -- just slow -- and it workes OK with matrox G400/DRI on i386). (http://gxsm.sf.net) -Percy