"Solved" my own problem with this.

nv driver: since there's no hardware acceleration, obviously there'll be
no DRI, ergo the error message.

nvidia driver issues: it still causes my virtual terminals to go
haywire, but at least now it displays at the resolution I want.
Apparently, there's an issue with AGPGART and the nVidia drivers, so it
can only be compiled as a module, not directly in the kernel. Recompiled
the kernel with agpgart as a module, and now I get 1280x1024.

Sound works OK on this too, didn't try SPDIF since I don't need it, and
only using stereo. Some crackling issues but apart from that it's OK.

On Sun, 2003-11-30 at 23:17, Emmanuel Gravel wrote:
> I've been installing Gentoo over the weekend and finished installing
> XFree86. emerge'd the nvidia accelerated drivers and set opengl to use
> that. The SN41G2 comes with onboard nForce2 chipset that has an
> integrated GeForce 4 MX. Both the nv driver and nvidia driver can use it
> "properly".
> 
> The issue with the nv driver is no hardware acceleration, but when I add
> the mesa glx drivers, I get the "XFree86-DRI missing" error, even with
> DRI enabled in XF86Config (loaded as a module, and the DRI section
> enabled with mode 0666).
> 
> When loading the nvidia driver and setting opengl to use the accelerated
> glx lib, glxgears goes quite a bit faster and no complaints about
> missing DRI, but it won't give me the full 1280x1024 that nv gives me
> (complains about memory bandwidth issues, and granted, it's 64MB of
> shared system memory, but still...) so it drops to 1024x768 with virtual
> desktop of 1280x1024. Plus, when I kill the X server, it never resets
> the video mode properly for the virtual consoles, and the screen is
> mostly black with green rectangles.
> 
> I'd obviously rather use the accelerated driver if I could, but with the
> lower res and strange behaviour, if I can't find a solution, then I'd
> rather stick with something that works. However, I'd want to have 3D
> acceleration working, even if it is software-only, so I'd need to figure
> out why I'm having DRI issues with nv.