Thanks.  Hans gave me that idea on the ASULUG.  After doing that I found that I
had no valid modelines for the depth.  Some debugging (thanks to startx >&
/tmp/xfree.debug) showed me the problem.  copied a valid modeline, changed the
clock setting to what the error said my max clock should be and boom, up came X
in 16bpp.  My problem was just using the GUI util (Xconfigurator) to try and get
it working.

Next issue will be learning nice so I can re-nice xmms to have a much higher
priority than the gps stuff so the music doesn't skip while maps are loading.

> > I've been messing with this annoyance on and off for the past year
> > to see if I could solve it.  So far no luck.  The problem:  Under
> > Windows I can run my laptop display at 1024x768x16bpp, but under X I
> > can only do 1024x768x8bpp.
> 
> Have you tried editing /etc/X11/XF86Config* ?
> 
> Find the "Screen" section and change the depth to 16.  (You may have
> more than one, but it's usually pretty obvious which is the right one.)
> 
> If it doesn't work, look at the messages from the X server to find
> out why.  You may need to redirect stdout and stderr to a file so
> that you can see them all.