I am dutch so excuse me for my use of english

I have a dell inspiron 8500 notebook and i have installed linux and windows xp on it. Both of them work fine but with linux i have problems with my display my screen resolution should be 12?? by 800 but that is not an option in the list so now i have set it to 1024(?) by 768(?) but in this way I don't use the entire screen. and when I am in the virtual console and I get to the bottom of the screen, then the hole screen is covered with wite stripes.

can you help me get rid of this??

should be fine to just edit the config file directly... /etc/X11/XF86Config towards the bottom (normally) there is a "Screen" section where you can see the permitted resolutions. I don't know what the exact dimensions you are after, but 1140x900 is a similar aspect... conventional widescreen is it? just edit it (add it to the beginning - also check for the Virtual desktop setting if that's there too....), and reload X

Moving to Linux - Hardware

Cool

can you be more specific please because I don't have any experience with linux. I use the book "sams theach yourself in 24 hours and I am only at the 4 hour so I don't know what you mean.