my guess is you tried to use the nvidia driver's provided by redhat. that's pretty much a no-no (they don't work usually). if during redhat installation, you've choosen run level 5, you should always use the vesa driver for the video. choosing the dell monitor for a laptop should be fine. this should let you get into the gui at a resolution of 1024x768 and a color depth of 16. you'll then need to get drivers from nvidia's website (you want the graphics drivers for IA32). you have close to the same card as i do (mine's a 32 MB geforce2go), so i don't think you'll be able to use the newest drivers; you'll have to check out the archives. the latest drivers that worked for me was the 3123 drivers, but i'm running rh7.3, so i don't really know which driver's will work for rh9.0. i do know that for my version of redhat for the kernel i'm using, that drivers newer than 3123 do not work. from the drivers that use rpms, you need 2 drivers. the actual driver file, will have "NVIDIA_kernel" in the filename and the glx driver which will have "NVIDIA_GLX" in the filename. or you could go with the NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-driver_version.src.rpm and the NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-driver_version.src.rpm and rebuild them. you need your kernel source code installed and kernel headers. install the built rpms. you need to install the NVIDIA_kernel first and the NVIDIA_GLX second. after you've installed them, you'll need to configure your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file. the 4191 drivers were the last rpm based installable drivers. of course you can still try the newest driver which is a *.run file that can basically only be run in text only, no X.
follow the steps and READ this if you want to use the rpm based installation packages -
http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86_4...xNotes4191.pdf
follow the steps and READ the README file and any other linkable document if you use the *.run of the latest driver.