nah, i have dealt with that problem before though, and now i deal with it by FTP installing
my problem was trying to get X set up correctly. the hwd -x didn't set up a good xorg.conf, because it didn't get the right resolutions. i figured i could just pretty much use my ubuntu xorg.conf, except for a few things here and there. well, that didn't work out cus i guess the nv driver isn't installed in arch (no idea how to install it either). then things just kinda snowballed from there. even xorg-config wouldn't give me the option to do 1920x1200, only up to 1280x1024.
basically, what turned into a simple xorg,conf issue turned into ,xinitrc issues because it was trying to load wmaker?? then i couldn't get gdm to run. awesome.