well the more I read on this -- the more confused I get ...

I have a Compaq r4012us laptop with Radeon Express 200M and suse 9.3. I'm using VESA Framebuffer for video and it wont allow me to set the video to 1280x800 for the widescreen monitor my laptop came with. What is the best way to get this done for a noob lke me?

I don't think that the vesa driver supports widescreen resolutions. You may try the radeonfb device.
Put something like 'video=radeonfb:1280x800' in your menu.lst. I don't know the exact syntax, maybe you need to play around a bit.
I have heard that radeonfb unfortunately doesn't work well with the fglrx driver.

Hello,

I have an HP L2000, which has the same chipset. I have 9.3 running pretty good on it. I did have to disable ACPI though. I think that is the only thing not working. I also did the 32 bit version too.

Check this thread for getting the video working:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=356511

Only thing I had to out of the ordinary was to add the display mode for my laptops native resolution. For some reason the ATI installer didnt know how to do 1280x768. Here is what I added to the section that has all the resolution modes:

# 1280x768 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1280x768@60" 129.859 1280 1368 1504 1728 768 769 772 814 +hsync +vsync

Also there is a section called Screen section with a subsection for displays called Modes. The file generated by the ATI installer had a 1280x960, I simply changed the 960 to a 768 which will cause it to use the above "Modeline".

Heres my install steps (scroll down):
http://www.suseforums.net/index.php?showtopic=15419

hope that helps