Hello! Last evening I tried Debian on my / partition. I used the CD that is designed to fetch packages from a mirror. Everything went well, and I logged in to a root account. I was unable to see how to start KDE or Xwindows. All I could figure out was that typing "X" gave me a grey screen with a moving mouse. The problem wasn't that it couldn't find a screen; indeed at first it couldn't but I copied xorg.conf (which I keep a copy of on the /home partition); then it couldn't find my touchpad so I hot-plugged in a Kensington mouse. From there I got the half-tone grey screen. I could move the cursor with the mouse, and with the touchpad. But nothing else happened. What should I have done? As far as I know I included a full complement of packages in the installation routine.

After configuring X with "xorgconfig" you might try "startx" you may also need to make a ~/.xinitrc file -- I'm not very debian savvy.

Did you install Sarge (Stable) or Etch (Testing)? 64-bit or 32-bit? Did you specifically ask, during the setup, for a 'desktop' task installation?

It may be worth noting that in my case, X did not work until I compiled/used version 2.6 of the kernel.

I used Sarge. I guess 32-bit. "startx" was not found as a command. I'll try xorgconfig to see if that makes anything possible. I'm trying Debian again tonight. But what is the command to type to actually start X with a desktop, such as gnome?

The packages all say i386 so I would guess 32-bit, to answer that question.

It just asked me for my video bus identifier, which I took to mean the 0000:... location given by lspci. But before I could type it in I hit an erroneous key and the screen was destroyed, there was no way to go back, and I didn't think to try ctrl-l which sometimes redraws the screen. Where is my incomplete and incorrect information lodged, and should I track it down?

If you installed Sarge, you probably don't have Xorg

Try dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86
Then, at the prompt, try 'gdm'; if that doesn't work, try 'xdm' ... Tell us what happens.

Thanks for your advice. The story tonight is: I installed, and the system seemed to know about "gdm". I saw some package info go by, and it loaded it on boot. I did some searching and found some evidence that this might be the command to try. I took a copy of xorg.conf from my other partition and dropped it into /etc/X11/ (if memory serves) so X cound find a screen. Unfortunately it seemed not to be quite the right thing to do although it works on Slackware, because it then couldn't quite load, but it couldn't unload either: I got a persistent screen asking me if I wanted failure information. It was impossible to accept it or dismiss it. I tried putting a rescue liveCD in to remove the file but I couldn't figure out where it was mounted or how to mount it so I reinstalled Slackware. But if you want to give me some instructions I might try Debian again.

The basic problem I'm having is that my Slackware is without sound. And, almost any recompiling of the kernel results in loss of the Internet. So I was wondering if Debian might give me both sound and Internet out-of-the-box.

I think xdm also gave a null result. Perhaps I can get some more sample xorg.conf files from live CDs that boot successfully (this is how I get Xwindows to work with Slackware--I took the xorg.conf from Slax). But in the end it just becomes another wild goose chase. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Minimum experimentation time, 5 hours. Also I put the iso's 1-7 on CD but they didn't work. All but #5 indexed properly on Debian install but then it couldn't read them so I ended up using HTTP again.

My goal: working linux with graphical environment (preferably KDE because dcop looks promising) with sound and with Internet, and without kernel recompiling always being a risk of Internet loss.

I still think this is a significant part of your problem. Sarge knows nothing about Xorg. If you want to try it again, install the testing version (Etch). Get your netinstal .iso here.

Thanks for your advice. I'll take that into account if I try Debian again. For now I'm giving Kubuntu a try.

hey man,
i JUST had the same problem that ur having, and figured it out:
so heres wut u do, with debian:

apt-get x-window-system kde kdm
then u download alllll those packages (could take a while.. well over 200MB)

once its done, if it doesnt start automatically, type:
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86, and follow the instructions.

this is all based on the assumption that ur internet IS working.
personally, i overwrote xdm and chose kdm on the configuration, and its worked just fine for me.

all u have to do once uve done all of that is restart ur computer and it will jump straight into Xwindows


best of luck
P.S. not sure if its x-windows-system or x-window-system that u have to apt-get...

Thanks Hawk! I'm trying kubuntu at the moment, which I believe is based on Debian, so I'll see how that goes. So far the only oddity is something about the use of sudo. But it is possible to give root a password and use root in the more typical unix fashion. So that's what I've done.