setting up linux on asus nova (p20?)

One of the first things that I had a problem with is the screen resolution. After mucking around a bit in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I realized that it was getting messed up at boot and I fixed it by adding vga=773 to the end of the kernel line of the configuration(s). I might have to reset this later on if I use a different monitor. For some reason, pcbsd/freebsd got the resolution right and I didn
t have to worry about it. Gentoo however is the distro that was giving me this problem. I picked gentoo instead b/c I was having trouble with other things in the psd distro and I'm more familiar with gentoo and linux in general compared to bsd. I guess I should be clear that I'm using the 2008 gentoo livecd as the install medium.

Another thing that wasn't working quite right was the shutdown of the audio drivers. there was a line to change in /etc/init.c/alsasound, according to http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=232875
which involved changing a --wait flag to --force .

acer x191w with intel GMA3000

With my new computer I was having a hard time to get my monitor, acer x191w, working at anything bigger than 1024x768. I think I solved it by running

sudo 915resolution 5a 1440 900

then restarting x (startx). Still the intel driver isn't working but at least I'm getting a good resolution. It's hard to be able to tell if this is exactly what I did to get it working, b/c I was mucking around and fixing other stuff that I did that prevented X from starting. Also it seems that rebooting will cause the changes made by 915resolution to disappear, so we'll see if it will still work when I reboot.