I've posted these problems in anotherthread but now I'm following redazz advice and starting my own thread .

Issues are these:
1) the most serious - I can't reboot or shutdown from Gnome. SOLVED - I was getting packages and upgrades from sid then I edited my sources.list to point out to unstable versions of Debian, marked all upgradable packages in Synaptic, apllied changes and actually making the upgrades. Somehow the problem was solved

2) I can't use Alt and Alt Gr keys and I need them to insert special characters of portuguese language, for the "euro" symbol and "at" symbol. Please, I'm not entirely new to this: I already went to keyboard layouts, portuguese is chosen as default; my XF86Config-4 file has the xrules and the xkbdlayout set to the right values
I also have tried dpkg-reconfigure locales but nothing seems to worked. In KDE and using kdm everything was ok. Should I return to KDE even if I prefer using Gnome? I'd like to think that this can be fixed and one can enjoy the freedom of choice made possible by linx

3) finally, in Gnome Control Center I use power management and I set standby to 10 min, suspend to 60 min and poweroff to 90 min but it doesn't work. I spent far more than 10 min away from my PC and when I got back I realize it didn't use the power management feature...

Thanks in advance... any helpful advice is hihgly appreciate

Return to KDE :{)

I would have thought that "dpkg-reconfigure locales" fixed your locale problem on gnome. Did you uncheck all the other locales when you chose your current locale?

You can change the keyboard layout for console with "dpkg-reconfigure console-data" but I don't think this should affect gnome -- still, no harm in trying it. You might also want to check /etc/environment to see if it looks OK.

Hi and thanks!
DeadParrot I've tried dpkg-reconfigure locales in many ways: I marked only one option (pt_PT) I've marked all of my interest (pt_PT, pt_PT@Euro, pt_PT ISO-8859-1...) none worked.

I've followed zvonSully suggestion and returned to KDE (in fact I'm posting this within it that's why I could use the @ symbol and the € symbol)

But I'm very disapointed because I couldn't never imagine that the different desktop environments would use so badly what I consider to be a system config. I mean, if I set keyboard and other stuff (as monitor type and resolution, mouse and so on) globally, as system configuration, why don't KDE and Gnome act the same way, since I've understood they are «layers» between the system and the user ?

I believe this is a major bug in Gnome I'm thinking in trying XFCE as I've read it's light yet powerful!

If you tried the "dpkg-reconfigure console-data" thing I suggested, you should notice that the changes won't take effect until you reboot, because the keymap is loaded during boot-time.

This is just to say that the problem was solved. I installed once again KDE as I've told you, kdm and what I believe were all the necessary libraries!
Than, I check for the keyboard configuration using KDE and, as usual, it worked correctly!
After that, and because I don't want to use KDE (sorry, it's only a matter of taste ) I removed it but, here is the difference, I picked one by one the packages to remove: kdebase, kdebase-data, kate, kwrite, kpalm... all the ones I tought I didn't need.
The first time I had removed KDE I used
which removed entirely KDE desktop environment with one single command !!!
This time I left kdm and some other libraries and somehow I think that could had sometihing to do with my keyboard misconfiguration.
The first time I logout and loged back in with gdm all my configuration where kept intact and correctly working!
So here it is my thanks for everyone who helped me