Well - I guess I'll stick to tosh for now.
In unrelated news from the real world - I think I'll have to go and kill somebody now.
Booked a flight home (it's only been three month and I'm only going to be home for two weeks - not anymore anyway) on wednesday and today about 2 hours before the limo picks me up the morons at the airline find out that they can't charge the flight to my credit card - works fine for the hotel though.
If you hear about somebody on a killing spree between Parsippany and the Newark airport don't worry - thats just me and I will include the intel drivers being fixed in my demands if I get cornered by the police - they'll never be able to fulfill that one!

lol. hope everything worked out by now.

im thinking of trying lindows, just to review it and see what the big fuss is about. maybe, just MAYBE, a debian-based distro is what my hardware needs. im going to snag a copy of knoppix sometime soon, and lindows 4.5 while im at it.

Try Knoppix - if it doesn;t work there isn't much sense in installing Debian.Knoppix uses the 'experimental' xfree version of debian which is the newest one available dor debian.If that doesn't work regular debian won't either.
Dunno about lindows - it's just debian with a couple of configuration bells and whistels AFAIK.
Anyway - I am home and happily running nvidia graphics.

DA, I have the same problem with a Gateway M305CRV. I went through a lot of the same stuff you did, with no success. I ended up buying an evil commercial X server, which gives the 1024x768 resolution. It was either that, or wait indeterminately for a solution from Gateway (not likely) or Xfree (probably will take a while), or live with 800x600. I got impatient and reasoned the laptop was cheap enough that I'm just considering the X server as part of the cost.

what do you mean X server? u mean a server server, as in webserver, or just like an XF86 add-on? i'd like to learn more about this 'x sevrer'. i might get one.

X server = XWindows server. XFree86 is an open source X Windows server. You would be replacing it with the commercial one, which comes with its own graphics chip drivers. You can try it at http://www.xig.com. You can download a demo, which is fully functional except that it quits after 20 minutes. Then if you buy it, you get a license key which removes the 20 minute restriction. It's not cheap, $99 for a laptop driver with 3d support. Plus, you are no longer fully open source. In fact if you read /var/log/messages, you notice that the kernel complains about loading a tainted (non-GPL license) module. But it works...

oh kool. thanks. so, what happens if it goes out of date? do they offer free upgrades? are you happy with it?

Laptop LX Editions Linux Solaris Solaris
LX Bronze $69 $69 . . . .
LX Silver $89 $89 . . . .
LX Gold $99 $99 . . . .
LX Platinum $129 $129

that's what i see. what one should i get, and what is the difference between the 4?

im using SuSE 9, will there be any problems? what do i do to install it, the guides there arent very clear, it just syas remove any conflicting packages (what ones are those?). since i have yast, what will i need to remove? anything doing with XF86? can you please write a small guide to what you did?

I've only had it a couple of weeks, so will probably have some of the same questions you have. Here's a direct link to the FAQ: ftp://ftp.xig.com/pub/FAQS/SUMMIT.txt

I am pretty happy with it. The only issue right now is the right alt and ctrl keys don't work. I haven't looked into that yet. I just saw something in the FAQ about xmodmap that looks relevant.

I got the Gold version. The Bronze and Silver don't have hardware 3d support. I didn't need what was in the Platinum version. http://www.xig.com/Pages/Atop/LX-LaptopSeries.html has the differences.

I have only used Red Hat, and don't know what yast is. The installation is pretty simple: download the file, untar it, and install the rpms in the resulting Summit* directory. There are two, the xsvc and the Summit_LX_Gold. The xsvc is first. Then when you startx it starts the Summit server instead of Xfree. I didn't remove anything, so Xfree is still there taking up space, but I 'll leave that alone til space becomes an issue. I did compile a kernel without agpgart and dri since Summit doesn't need them, but I don't know if you are required to. I think it worked before that, but agpgart may have been compiled as a module under the RH default kernel. Also, they don't support 2.6 kernels yet. I am using 2.4.24, as the RH kernel (2.4.20-something) didn't have ACPI and also wouldn't let me enable DMA on the hard drive. So, my hdparm -t was like 3.25 MB/sec. Under 2.4.24, ACPI works (mostly, at least the cpu fan turns off part of the time) and DMA works as well (hdparm -t = 24 MB/sec - ok for a 4200 rpm laptop hd).

i dont have that kind of money right now, or probably ever. i use linux because its free, and better than windows. i paid $50 for suse 9 because i thought it was worth it, and it was. then i paid $10 because someone told me slackware 9.1 worked with 1024x768 resulotion, but it didnt, so that's $10 down the drain. i bought both of them with the thoughts u did: the laptop's cheap, i can afford it. but not anymore. when i buy suse 9, slackware, and this Comm. X system, its not worth it. in total, it'll be $160 !!! Windows costs less than that. unless someone can find me a serial, i''ll just stay with 800x600, or just use windows full-time.

Hey - give the thing at least a shot in the trial version.If it works you can at least complain to the xfree guys about the buggy drivers - pm me for further details.

well, i downloaded it, and tried installing it on suse 9 personal. apparently, you need a kernel source with the corresponding running kernel, which personal does not come with. every kernel i try to compile fails, so i stick with defaults. i cannot install this X on suse 9, so i installed mandrake 9.0. installed it (successfully), and got some DSP error.

http://www.knoppix.net reports a rumour that that knoppix 3.4 is less than two weeks away, with the 2.6 kernel.

Knoppix has a special cheat code for notebooks e.g. "fb1024x768" which I've used with success on systems with LCD screens (don't have a notebook).

You should also get the latest kernel drivers needed for intel graphics this way.

Sorry if this post is redundant, I haven't been following this thread until now.

lol, damn. a few days ago i was about to order knoppix from almostfreelinux.com, but decided to postpone it. good thing, because EVERY SINGLE TIME I buy a distro, its out-of-date withing the next few days. i did that with mandrake 9.0, i bought 9.1, and (no lies here) 4 days later, 9.2 was released. im sick of it all. once knoppix with 2.6 comes out, that's it, last distro i buy. ill upgrade everything manually.

so now that im on slackware 9.1, and im staying with it, how do i install it? it doesnt have small rpm support, but its not supported by slackware officially.

i installed mandrake 9, RPMed all the packages, ran Xsetup, and configured it, and i still got an error when doing startx. the same DSP error.

yep, still at it trying to get it to work. i got maya 4,5 to install in slackware, but it wont run (it crashes) i think because its not at 32bit colors, or 1024x768. i tried to install the commercial X server by installing it via RPM (rpm -i --nodeps --force) and it still doesnt work. i tried rpm2tgz and it still doesnt work. ive given up at this point until a new release of X. any words of encouragement?