installation on travelmate 4651

[d38dm8nw81k1ng]

i've got myself an acer travelmate 4651LMi lappy. pretty great it is too. here's the specs:

Intel Pentium M 1.6GHz
GeForce Go 6600
80GB SATA HDD
Full Intel Centrino Deal (Wireless etc)
1400 x 1050 res screen (15")
etc

I tried to install Gentoo when i first got it, but to no avail. The CD is loaded to the point where i choose a kernel. if i use the gentoo kernel, it will boot up, but i cannot see the splash screen, and thus don't know if it is fully working. if i use the gentoo-nofb kernel it doesn't even boot up, freezing after the last bootup process (before the splash screen is supposed to appear). i can still see the text telling me it's loading and all the dots afterwards but nothing happens.
I have since installed SuSE and it works almost perfectly, meaning that there must be some setup that will work. i tried to install slackware too, using the sata.i kernel, which, surprisingly, couldn't detect my SATA hard disk when i tried to use cfdisk. please help as i still have windows on my machine, from when i was still testing suse to make sure everything worked and i really really want to get rid of it.

PS. if this seems a little bit of a "new guy" post, it's because i've just copied and pasted this from my post in the gentoo.org forums, which is my first post there

[onlinebacon]

Something like Kanotix has really good hardware detection, so would LFS if you did it for that machine, try BSD as well, really nice OS