I certainly am glad that I added the notes previously about setting up linux on the laptop. The drive developed a couple bad blocks exactly where the /bin directory was stored which hosed the entire directory. The machine was not too happy abou that. I ended up reinstalling the entire system. I had save some setup files but forgot some, name X’s configuration file. I reapplied what had been previously written and now the screen resolution is correct. Now I just have to remember what I did to setup the sound. I am running the 2.6 kernel with alsa compiled in but kde is not picking up on that, not sure why just now. Eventually I will figure it out and then hopefully remember to put the info up here for future reference.
I did learn how to map out bad blocks using reiserfs. Not too hard will put that up later and hopefully I still have the page I got it from so that credit due can be given.