Are you sure rivafb in 2.5 has better support than in 2.4? I thought it was rather the other way around, but I may be wrong.
No, I'm not sure. But anyway, it would be a lot of work to backport because of the switch Paul mentioned. I guess I will try to get the information on the drivers and try to patch 2.4 instead. The remaining problem is the kind of problem you'd expect to find a clean and short solution.
Anyway, I couldn't even get the new kernel to boot and it broke some things. Like /dev/null was missing. It is incredible the kind of things that fail when /dev/null is a file and not a device. I couldn't even ssh into the box :(
Eduardo.[1] the screen is all bright orange whenever X (or the console in text mode) tries to blank it. Everything else works alright but as the machine should be on all the time I don't want to risk burn-in, if that happens in LCD too.