I've tried FreeBSD and Fedora Core 3, but neither display anything but a blank screen when I try running graphics. I read a couple other threads on this, but it didn't seem like anything was resolved at the time.

I would REALLY like to use something besides Windows on my laptop, but I seem confined to it.

I'm sorry if this actually has been answered or is an ignorant question: I'm not very good with unix or linux yet.

Thanks!

The quick and dirty answer is to use the VESA driver in Xorg or XFree86.
(Change Driver "via" to Driver "vesa" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf or XFree86.conf)

This will give you something to start with, but no 3D or Xv. If you're
ambitious and have lots of time and bandwidth you can download and
compile a CVS release of Xorg with the Unichrome project drivers. I'm
in the middle of doing this and so far I've got Xv working. If you're starting
from scratch your might want to try ArchLinux. I used to use Slackware
but v10 has gcc3.x which I don't care for and Arch's pacman system IS pretty
cool. If you do compile the KM400/via drivers from the unichrome project
you need to have VGA=791 in the boot parameters. Unforunately, your
console screen will be gibberish once you exit X windows. Also you can
get a driver module for X windows for the synaptics touch pad.
"pacman -S synaptics" It comes with a program to adjust settings on the
fly (synclient).

Other notes for this guy:
Sound (Alsa) snd-via82xx
Ethernet via-rhine
CPU Speed: powernow_k7
Wireless Net: ndiswrapper (this requires you to download Win2k Drivers for Rt2500.
The WinXP drivers from the Averatec site crash )
I haven't been able to get ACPI sleep modes working yet.

Good Luck!

http://ericji.blogspot.com/

this worked for me. Hope it helps

for the wireless it's better to use the native linux driver, vot the ndiswraper. you can find it on sourceforge. to compile is a snap, you just need the kernel sources, especially with 2.6 kernel it's really easy. if you want the rt2500 utility as well you'l need the qt, but it's worth the trouble.