Shuttle SN85G4

For what it's worth, I suspect a number of your issues with the Samsung Syncmaster 191T are from the video card -- I have a 191T on my office computer on a Matrox G550 card, and have had somewhat different experiences (albeit under Windows). It's perfectly happy showing the text-mode bootup screens when hooked up via the DVI cable, and the Windows driver also claims to be displaying 1280x1024 at 60Hz on it -- although I wouldn't be too surprised if it's easy to fudge the numbers slightly in a Windows driver. (If you're curious, I'll check when I'm in next, and see what the on-screen display says about the input in the two modes, so you can compare.)

Speaking of which, I'm somewhat curious as to why you chose that particular monitor. I chose it by going to Fry's and looking at all the options and picking the one that I thought looked best (and have been quite pleased with it since), but somehow I'd suspect you of having a more rigorous method of weighing the options.

I'll definitely agree with your comments about dual screens, too -- my aforementioned office computer has two, even though the second is only a rather aged Sun crt, and it's definitely a help for a lot of things, to the point where I'm tempted to see whether having a third monitor (a little one, to put my email window and maybe a zwrite window on) would also be worthwhile.

I got that particular monitor on a recommendation from Hua (the whole system was acquired that way, actually). It has a very nice picture quality. For a while I was worried that I was going to miss the much higher resolution I could have gotten by going with a Dell flatscreen that could do 1600x1200, but that was when using the default X fonts. When I switched over to neep again, the screen seems quite readable.

Yeah, I think the video card is the source of all of my troubles. It would probably be fixable with a firmware update, but getting it in and out of the case is hard enough that now that I have a workaround, I'm not sure I'm going to bother.