We are back and making some progress

Meanwhile, many things have changed. Entertainment moved to the renovated basement, where I now have a Mitsubishi HD1000U projector and self-made 106" screen. Wow!

So, it's time to feed the PJ some movies. The good news that my old "friend" Freevo has made big progress since I touched it last time two years ago. It installs flawlessly by yum with all the dependencies. Moreover, both Freevo and Mplayer still work well with no X11 whatsoever, just need framebuffer initialized!

And one needs NO ATI drivers for that. And one needs NO kernel compilation for that.

1. Add the stock module to the boot RAM disk
mkinitrd --with=radeonfb /boot/initrd-radeonfb-2.6.19 2.6.19-1.2288.2.1.fc5
2. Add framebuffer configuration string to the grub.conf

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.19-1.2288.2.1.fc5 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 noapic acpi=off rhgb quiet video=radeonfb
initrd /initrd-radeonfb-2.6.19

Now reboot, and tell Freevo to use the frame buffer ( /etc/freevo/freevo.conf )
display = fbdev
geometry = 1280x720

Mplayer liked this video out option the most so far:

mplayer -vo directfb /var/tmp/Ostrov.avi