UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Even though I have been logging in to a UNIX shell at school to complete school projects and write programs, but I had never really worked in UNIX environment. But a couple of weeks back I got hooked on to Solaris 9OE, read a book, a tutorial, a document provided on the Sun Microsystems website, and finally bought the Solaris 9 OE software from the Sun website and downloaded it and burnt it into cd's. Then I cleared a partition on my AMD Athlon laptop and installed the distribution on it. So now, my laptop runs fdisk and asks me in the beginning whether I want to run XP or SOlaris.
Now comes the hard part. The installation went fine. I had learnt about slices and how to create them so I sliced up the partition in the way I wanted and everything was working. However the gliches:

1) The OS did not detect my Video Card, so I am still in the 640x480 mode, with 16 colors. My Display adapter is "NVIDIA GeForce4 420 Go(Sony)", so when I selected the nVidia cards option in the installation of the device driver and then the installation program probed the card, it returned an error. So I had to make do with the generic display settings. What do I do to get a real crisp 1024x728 resolution with something like 32 bit colors or millions of colors?

2) I have a DSL connection (ethernet) and also a Dial-up connection. Any leads as to how to set them up? How and where do I access my Ethernet card from? And how do I configure it? Any leads would be appreciated, and then I can figure out something.

After I am able to connect to the internet through Solaris 9 OE, I would be able to download applications and well, kind of really start using Solaris rather than Windows XP.

I would really appreciate some help.
Thank You

ps:- please forgive my "windows" style of addressing certain terms such as "32 bit colors" and "download applications" since I am still to know what they are called in unix.

New GeForce drivers have been a problem for many *nix users. i recommend searching them out on Google. (or sun's site.. or X archives, etc..)
Read a decent tutorial on the configuration of your ethernet devices - there are thosuands of them out there - try google.ca.
Assuming you're using a PCMCIA (or embedded) NON-win-modem, you can probably find some decent tutorials out there... as far as winmodems go, there aren't too many drivers out there, so you might be SOL, depending on how big your manufacturer is.
It's all the same to us. colours are colours, and applications == programs == binaries -- etc.