Raspberry Pi setup notes part 1: getting the display to work!

I received my Raspberry Pi yesterday, and today got it working well enough to display a text-based console on a DVI monitor using Arch Linux. There were a few hiccups along the way, so here are the complete notes so that anyone googling for the same errors as the ones I saw can benefit from my experience.

tl;dr: the file /boot/config.txt sets up various things before the OS is loaded, including HDMI settings. The one in the Arch Linux SD card image didn't work with my machine setup. The system default, which you can get just by removing that file completely, worked just fine.

Here are the details showing how I got to that...

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