SuSE ships XFree86 4.0.1 libraries and installs an XFree86 3.3.6 X server.
The libraries are not completely backwards compatible, and have a bug in
which listing the available video modes hangs the X vidmode library.
This bug is fixed in XFree86 4.0.2, which should be the next X release.
In the meantime, use the precompiled binaries of SDL, which have been
specially built to avoid these problems. I’m going to put up a binary
of the current CVS at:
http://www.libsdl.org/cvs/libSDL-1.1.so.0.5.1
You can tell if your system will have this problem if SDL reports
VidMode gamma support when you run configure to build it, and the
output of xdpyinfo shows XFree86 336 as the version of the server.
See ya!
-Sam Lantinga, Lead Programmer, Loki Entertainment Software