With a good night sleep and a fresh cup of coffee, I sat down and decided to tackle this issue again. I decided to use
Suse 9.3 Live CD to troubleshoot this problem. This way I can simply reboot to get a clean system and it is the only distro that I've tried that loads the i810 driver correctly. Thanks to Suse and Novell.
I decided to read thru Xorg.0.log and try to understand what it was telling me. If you remember, I used the 915resolution tool to patch the bios of the video chip to include a resolution of 1280x800. But, that appeared to do no good. Well, stepping thu the log file, I noticed that the mode that I patched was not listed in the file. X detected and listed other modes correctly and also listed modes with 0 values. So, I decided to take a mode that was properly detected and change it to the 1280x800 resolution. I also added ModeLine for both the values I received from
http://xtiming.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/xtiming.pl and gtf.
Voila, after restarting X - I finally have 1280x800 resolution. Its beautiful and crystal clear.
I can now get rid of Windows!
Thanks to everyone for your help.