Okay, so I did a clean netistall of Debian and boot up to find a bunch of old packages. I thought, that's okay, I'll just
That did pretty much nothing. I still have OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 and many more outdated packages. Also, I just realized that Debian intalls kernal 2.4.27 by default. I am stuck with KDE 3.3, too. :-(

So how do I go about upgrading my packages to a semi-modern state? Would I be better off to reinstall w/ a 2.6.x kernal before I mess with this install?

Here's the real issue: you're using Sarge, which is rock solid and stable, but is not up to date. If you want to use bleeding edge, use Sid (Unstable) which is surprisingly stable, but with more updated packages. I should mention that you shouldn't be surprised if something breaks from time to time (after all, it is "unstable"), but is probably as stable as the latest Fedora or Ubuntu. If you find you need rock solid, you'll have to sacrifice newer packages. Otherwise, edit /etc/apt/sources.list and replace every "sarge" with "sid" or "stable" with "unstable". Then apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade.

As for installing a new kernel, you can actually just apt-get install kernelnamehere. Use apt-cache search kernel |grep 2.6 to find one of your liking.

Or if you want to recompile your own, google for "compile kernel Debian way" as Debian has some packages that will help you do it easily...

Okay, thanks, I'm going to update to sid and get a new kernel. I guess I can always manually download packages to get the newest versions of the most important ones.