Video initialization bug?

Greetings!

I'm just getting started with SDL.   The documentation seems to indicate

that calling SDL_GetVideoInfo after initializing SDL with the video
subsystem flag should return a valid pointer to a video info structure.

However, this is not the case on my system; I am getting a NULL value. 

After getting the NULL, I can set the video mode just fine, and after
setting the video mode, SDL_GetVideoInfo returns non-null. Looking at the
source, it seems that the static SDL_VideoDevice current_video is not
getting set, although I’m not sure about the usual semantics for this.

My system is a debian linux running X11R6.

Any thoughts?  Is this a bug on my system, in the SDL library, or in the

documentation? I’ve also noticed that fullscreen modes are not
available… this might be due to X extensions needing to be installed,
but I’ve played commercial game demos here that can sucessfully switch to
the fullscreen from X. (Did the loki ports use SDL? I seem to remember
reading that.)

Cheers,
djt