I work under Linux and I have this problem in all Blender versions. My graphics card is radeon 9100. When I press F12 Blender crash, text window too. Does anybody know how to solve this problem? I heard something about environmental variables like RADEON_NO_VTXFMT but I don’t know how to use it? Please help 
Yeah, I’ve heard that ATI drivers for linux suck, too… so maybe better get an Nvidia chipset 
I’ve just changed my graphics card and I think radeon is more powerfull.
I think blender write in terminal what kind of error is it, but when blender crash, terminal crash too. It would be very helpful when blender writes all errors messages to file, but how to do that? %|
Have you installed ATI’s graphics drivers?
http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/linux/index.html
Apart from that, you can redirect terminal output to a file with:
./blender > blender.log 2>&1
I’ve tried drivers from ati’s, and there wasn’t any problems with rendering but blender worked very slowly when I went to tomato view with more than one texture. Maybe I have bad configured XF86Config - I’ve used fglrxconfig, maybe should I change some parameters in XF86Config file. I would be greatfull when somebody who use this drivers help me with XF86Config. 
it’s Potato view, not Tomato view.

Martin
Yes Potato 
When I try to render (with DispWin enabled) I’ve got error message: blender: r200_vtxfmt.c:1083: r200VtxfmtUnbindContext: Assertion ‘vb.context == ctx’ failed. ??? 