I suppose I will have to try that on a native Linux box.. I have an older laptop with an nvidia 7950GTX in it which should suffice, but at present it's running a much older Linux distro, so I need to reinstall it with fedora 16/17/18.  It's too bad, though, all other OpenGL apps work fine in this VM - this might be something you want to address in code?  It's cheap and easy to replicate this, just get vmware fusion or player (player is free), install a fedora VM, build crystalspace.  I'm happy to help test if you wish.  In the meantime I'll chase down getting a native Linux install going on the other box and try it again.

Attached is the log with walktest (debug build) ran with the options you specified.

GL information:
OpenGL renderer: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (vendor: VMware, Inc.) version 2.1
  Mesa 7.11.2

running on Fedora 16 under VMWare Fusion 3.x (under OSX).  Same results under VMWare Player on Win7, VM in question also running F16.  Other Linux 3D apps (such as vegastrike, the GameKit library, etc) work in these same VMs.

The above was generated with the latest pull from SVN - the only difference at runtime is I get a *black* window instead of a *white* window (with 2.0-stable).  I don't see the crystalspace logo in the window in either case, nor anything else, save some of the debug messages that are displayed as text inside the crystalspace app window (in addition to inside the terminal from which the app was launched), which then go away and I am presented with the aforementioned homogenous black or white window, depending on the version I'm using.

I was thinking about that... but I really want to get it working more under Linux than under Windows, to be honest... I've gotten other things like GameKit to build and run fine on the same environment, I'm just stumped as to why CS won't work.  It compiles fine, it just.. doesn't work.  not even the simple tests.  I've googled all the warnings that come up in 'verbose' mode but I'm not finding anything.  Any debug output that I could generate and post here which might be helpful?

I have so far tried this on Fedora 16, Fedora 17, CentOS 6.2, and Cygwin under Windows 7 home premium.

Cygwin: won't even build.  Claims it needs wfopen() which is a MSFC class which Cygwin doesn't provide.  end of line - crystalspace's docs say cygwin is supported, but this seems particularly non-supported to me
All of the Linuxes: builds great.  Runs and displays a white screen sometimes with some 3D artifacts, otherwise just white.  Yes I'm running linux under VMWare, but VMWare is supposedly passing through the 3D acceleration, and other 3D apps in the same VM work fine (ie, vegastrike).

I get similar results using 2.0 or the latest release from SVN, except that 2.0-stable won't compile under fedora 17.  I'm kind of stuck here - I've been a programmer since 1981 so I feel kind of dumb not being able to get this to work right, but I keep running into roadblock after roadblock just getting the basic stuff up and running, and after following the docs to the letter.  Please advise