Whoot, new laptop for me, and to take advantage of this beautiful 1400x1050, I figured I might as well learn how to enable subpixel rendering - its easy!
All you need to do is edit /usr/X11R6/etc/fonts/fonts.conf and remove the XML comments surrounding the section for subpixel rendering.
At this point, you may want to grab the TrueType fonts from a convenient Windows box and dump them into /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF.
Now, restart X and you're set. Fire up a terminal that supports XFT (such as Gnome-Terminal), select a scalable font and admire the sexiness. If it looks a bit goofy, you've probably got a screen with BGR pixels instead of RGB. Find the tag that says rgb, change it to bgr and give X a kick in the pants.