CrunchBang Linux

Solved!
For anyone dealing with poulsbo (I guess), pine and cedar trail graphics cards with these ASUS netbooks, mine being 1011cx:

Upgrade to debian testing - I installed Waldorf from here.

Get a later kernel, at least 3.3 - I used liquorix: http://liquorix.net/

Then use Synaptec to get packages: search for "video modesetting" and "lxrandr" and install the packages, and reboot.

This will fix the resolution issue so it's properly 1024x600
and enable the VGA-out for external display (only external - connect to projector and the screen goes out on the netbook but I can position myself in the classroom so I'm in front of the big screen - not a biggie).
Still no total display control or extended desktop though.

The drivers are not really open source but were rolled into the kernel at some point after 3.2, near as I can figure, which means that offering this netbook with no operating system is really creepy in my opinion because it's hard to get it working without the (crappy) meego distro and so it sort of undermines the whole idea of open-source, forcing less-knowledgable users, with less time than I had, to use one of these cartoon/for-8-year-olds touch-screen-looking proprietary distros just to get basic function.  Yuck!

Waldorf seems quite smooth so far by the way, just excellent.  I don't know how to edit the post heading to "solved" though, sorry...

Re-installed.  I got a bit giddy when I found the links from that awful-looking fork to .deb files.  Didn't process that the kernel was different, knowing nothing.  The Debian forum has people in despair at trying to compile packages to drive this atom n2*00 hardware that it seems people bought without realizing it was supposed to be a platform for a proprietary distro...  I'm going to try upgrading the kernel (I can do that right?), which I figure will be a process easier to find instuction to than "force this here driver package that actual code-writers haven't solved."  Apparently this machine works out of the box with the fedora 17 distro (3.3.4), and the kernel for that ubuntu patch was 3.3.0, so I'm gonna see if I can't make that work.  All I want is a vga-out port for God's sake...  I haven't seen any real solutions that don't involve installing some bloated carcass on your netbook so if I find one I'll post it here as a coda to this comedy of errors...

I understand the problem better - maybe this will help others in the future, maybe I can do it by myself (learning!)

http://wiki.ubermix.org/page/Cedar_Trail_Update

since the files end in .deb it means they are debian compatible and not only ubuntu-distro like ubermix from which this wiki comes, right?  I don't know how to compile them or whatever I might have to do but we'll see...