buncha questions from a newbie

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 packages and all those thousand of free utilities and programs available online.
I would really appreciate some help.
Thank You