Done some digging and maybe found where is the problem for some of you. These may be the root of your problems. Maybe some of you coders should respond???
About ATI cards:
It seems that the swashmebuckles 2400 XT does have a problem with "Unable to find extension "GL_ARB_draw_elements_base_vertex"". Where the table i've found does not say about 2400 XT and OS X, but does say about the 2600 and OS X, so i assume very similar capabilities. It seems that you should circumvent this problem by newest drivers (it actually says that 1.6.26 driver, not exactly yours, does not support it, but the 7.18.11 does, so this extension was added somewhere in the middle i think). Or you should be as of now completely able to run it under Linux or Windows (above 6.14.10.6748).
As for batman55, things could be more complicated. I could say that the X800 seems to be too old to run it. Not sure though, as I mentioned, some coder should have a look at this, I'm not sure which of these things the engine actually uses and which of them are not essentially needed.
It also seems that support for the missing "GL_ATI_shader_texture_lod" extensions was removed at some point from the drivers.
The 4650 and 4570 should run it without a problem, so FekLeyrTarg and knight334 may have problems of different nature. The same goes to mr.WHO.
So, the premature conclusion is, that in the case of ATI GPUs, you should have at least the HD 2XXX series (preferably not in Mac) to run the 3.6.17... build.
It has been known that ATI's OpenGL coverage is somewhat lacking to NVIDIAs, but now I'm quite surprised, how big the gap is.
And for the tables, you might have find them useful sometimes:
http://feedback.wildfiregames.com/report/opengl/Maybe if you post your logs... More logs, more information...