When using X on my Acer Aspire One (110L) and playing videos with mplayer, X would occasionally blank the screen after a few minutes without any way out but to suspend/resume to get your X back. This didn’t only happen with mplayer, and it didn’t have anything to do with xscreensaver.Anyway, after some digging I found that adding Option "FramebufferCompression" "off"to the Device-section of my xorg.conf resolved the problem.

Another cool thing I found out while going through ssh manpages is that you can silence the motd on login simply by touching ~/.hushlogin.