As an update to the prior report... In the current "experimental" version of mesa-dri (6.5.3-1), the driver shows the same symptons as my home-compiled version. That is, when using the r200 DRI driver, the test program shows a solid color (see attached screenshot) -- rather than the desirable 50% gray. This is different from the prior debian packages which showed a banded image with the r200 driver.
Perhaps some change in the build toolchain happened recently, and a newer version of gcc manifests this bug differently??
<<attachment: blend-6.5.3-1.png>>
