I recently purchased a Gateway MX3230, unfortunately, a few show stopping hardware incompatibilities have stopped me from putting Slackware or indeed any other distribution on it as of yet. The specs of the laptop are as follows:

- 1.5 Ghz Celeron M
- 512 Mb RAM
- VIA P4M800 PRO chipset with Unichrome Pro IGP
- Realtek RTL8185 wireless
- 1280x768 resolution widescreen.

The first issue I am tackling is Slackware specific and involves the refusal of Xorg to set a widescreen resolution, limiting me to an ugly looking 1024x768. I am aware that the issue probably stems from the phoenix BIOS setting bad VBE modes, however,
Ubuntu 6.06 (although not detecting it as widescreen initially) does allow me to set and use the 1280x768 mode in the xorg.conf. But when I do this with slackware it flat out refuses to set widescreen and defaults to the next lowest resolution; and if I remove all modes except 1280x768 it defaults to a crazy high resolution like 1440x900.

The VIA openchrome drivers are incompatible with this chipset as of yet and I'm using the VESA drivers, I am still investigating how to make the openchrome drivers work.

My question Is: Is their anyway to override the modes and force set the 1280x768 mode?
If anyone can help me out or point me in the right direction I would greatly appreciate it.

according to www.openchrome.org only certain chipsets are supported by Slackware by default. Check in the release notes whether your chipset is supported. 3D is a problem with VIA chipsets. I know, I have one on my laptop. You have to crack away at it. I use Ubuntu on my lappy due easy of install. Trying Suse soon. If your chipset is supported change your Xorg.conf to enable.

I'm still working on getting 2d/3d acceleration working with the openchrome drivers. I already downloaded the latest modular xorg and compiled the openchrome drivers against them; but I've still had no luck.

Right now however, I am aiming towards getting a widescreen resolution using the standard VESA drivers. Reviewing the Xorg.0.log I can see that the xorg sets 1280x768x32 as vesa mode 17b as it should be. However, when it actually loads the int10 intialization module it complains about a bad vbios checksum (impossible on an IGP) and says it will not use 1280x768 as it is not a defined mode. It also says it will not use the inbuilt mode 1440x990 as it is wider than the screen, and at this point it defaults to 1024x768.

So what I'm really looking for is someone who knows how to override the VBE modes so I can set the widescreen resolution. I am aware that the openchrome drivers do this but I simply haven't been able to get them to work.