happy and smiling now
 

I stupidly missed the minimum system memory requirements.
sometime around two in the morning i stumbled upon them.
went and got more memory, reinstalled and wham i had things working mostly....
applied the "noaccel" line to xorg.conf and now the screen is as it should be
eventually i would like to figure out the proper driver and maybe play a game or two on linux, but that's another project
thanks for your forum and help :)
I'm sure I'll have more questions

Not really a question - moved to success stories :)