So....I upgraded. Everything runs fine until i get to ship selection or purchasing. Then, it loads just the text (no images) on the screen and waits...until i move my mouse. Upon mouse movement vendetta quite promptly crashes. Here's the dump from my errors.log:

This is Redhat 9.0, X 4.3.0, NVIDIA Drivers 1.0-4349 on a Geforce4 MX 440

caught SIGABRT; generating stack trace
fault address 00005499, 0813bacf
ss 0x0000002b 43
uesp 0xbffff1c8 -1073745464
efl 0x00200246 2097734
cs 0x00000023 35
eip 0xffffe002 -8190
err 0x00000000 0
trapno 0x00000000 0
eax 0x00000000 0
ecx 0x00000006 6
edx 0x00000000 0
ebx 0x00005499 21657
esp 0xbffff1c8 -1073745464
ebp 0x00000001 1
esi 0x0828ecf0 136899824
edi 0x0829409c 136921244
ds 0x0000002b 43
es 0x0000002b 43
fs 0x00000000 0
gs 0x00000033 51

check your /etc/X11/XF86Config

find, and uncomment, the line under section "modules":
# load "dri"

then under section "Device" with the line:
Driver "nvidia"

write:
Option "NvAGP" "0"

This will bump framerate a little, but you can play it...

hope u get it working...

Don't propose turning off AGP as a solution to all Linux problems. There must be some other kind of problem underlying all of this. Do any/all of you have side-band addressing on? How about your vendetta settings? Maybe you're all using the same settings and those settings crash the game. I dunno. But I don't get it, and apparently neither does Icarus, 'cause I've seen him playing 3.2.6.

Firstly, I refuse to disable AGP. I'm not slowing down X just to play vendetta (at circa 1997 speeds for that matter). The problem isn't "Oh you're using AGP!" its, "There's something wrong with this patch".

I have a feeling (after reading other, similar posts) that its only occuring on older pre DX9 type hardware. Granted, this shouldn't affect stuff in Linux, but welcome to the real world. I hope the devs are looking into this, I'd hate to be put on hold to the point where I stop playing. I'm sure other people are feeling the same way.

Devs: if you need futher info (XF86Config4, error logs, etc), let us know.

What confuses me is the SIGABT. The nvidia driver must be doing that which I think is a bad thing.

I think it has to do with the ARB_vertex_buffer_object extension and actually turning off AGP may disable this extension. That's my only working theory as to why nvidia cards are working as poorly as they seem.
I'm going to add an option to disable vbo and shaders to see if that solves people's problems.