Hi,
has anybody gotten cgminer to run on the console (i.e., no running X)?
Tracing the cgminer process, it gets as far as opening /dev/ati/card0 and running a few ioctl calls (and incidentally _not_ opening /dev/ati/card1, despite the fact that I have two of them), but then clGetDeviceIDs() returns -1. Ouch.
As ckolivas already mentioned, you need X for the drivers to communicate with the graphics card. See
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=28402.msg387438#msg387438 and answers.