Sager 5760 Problems in Linux

I'm trying to get Linux (Fedora Core 6, specifically) running on my brand-spanking new Sager 5760. It's a wonderful machine and runs almost everything superbly. However, I'm having a few problems and was hoping someone out there has already worked through these.

1. DVD drive disappears. When I use grub as the bootloader, the DVD drive is not visible in Windows XP or Linux. If I switch to using NTLDR before grub, it's visible in XP but still not in Linux (as it still has to go through grub to get into Linux).
2. Wifi is horrible. Using the latest ipw3945 drivers, the laptop wants to be within 5 feet or so of the access points to work semi-reliably. But even then, it doesn't always work right. If I am more than 5 feet away, it's very random as to whether it will even see the access points (usually not) and connecting almost never works. I have also tried ndiswrapper, but that only succeeds in hanging the computer, requiring a hard reboot. BTW, everything is sweet as candy in XP so I'm assuming this is an OS/driver/config issue.
3. Touchpad can't be configured. This wouldn't be such an issue if I could just make that infernal tapping "feature" go away. Has anyone found a driver that works with this thing?

Other than those 3 headaches, I LOVE this computer. If I can't get these things working right, I'm going to have to return this magnificent beast, and that royally sucks.

Anyone have any help they can offer?

It doesn't even get far enough for fstab to matter. No device is ever created. dmesg output:

ide0: I/O resource 0x1F0-0x1F7 not free.
ide0: ports already in use, skipping probe
ide1: I/O resource 0x170-0x177 not free.
ide1: ports already in use, skipping probe

This is BEFORE ata_piix also tries to open the port but disables it. I mention this because 99% of the time, this message would indicate that ata_piix has already locked the port before the ide driver gets to it. Not here, though.

And as I mentioned before, if grub is the bootloader, XP can't see the DVD drive either. If NTLDR is the bootloader, it sees it just fine.

I'm really not here to get into a religious debate, especially since the problems I'm seeing have nothing to do with which distro is the king of the mountain.

However, just to rule out this variable, I just installed Ubuntu, and it has all the exact same problems.

And that's the heart of the problem with the touchpad, it isn't Synaptic-compatible. It's made by ElanTech, and from what I can tell, is completely unsupported. Trying to use the synaptic driver causes X to fail to load.

I would wager that you haven't touched Fedora since fc5 or fc6, which is where their laptop support finally gelled.

I will repost my question over there. Thanks!