I've got the same laptop as well
You may be interested to know there is a dedicated mailing list for running Linux on the Presario R3000 (and the similar HP model). You can join or read the archives here:
http://mail.kdewebdev.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000
Also, I want to point out that the solution in the link I posted is not specific to FC3, it also works on Gentoo for me. It certainly saves a bunch of time messing with the synaptics drivers which are very difficult to get configured in xorg.conf. With this command line option (what the hell does it do anyway?) your touchpad magically turns into a ps2 mouse. The only negative is that the scroll feature doesn't work, but I can live with it