curiousity- is it possible to run x windows withoUT KDE or Gnome?
 

there it is, the question

Yup, there are many alternatives instead of using Gnome or KDE.

Blackbox
Fluxbox
IceWM
XFce
Enlightenment
WindowMaker
Sawfish

And many others....

As trickykid says, you certainly can. Just be aware that you will probably want to load the QT and GTK libraries, though, since there are a number of apps that depend on them.

Steve

but is it possible to be in true terminal - not emulator and run programs such as gaim?

You can run the bare minimum twm or mwn and all you get is a terminal window and that's it. that's about as bare bones as you can get. But to run something that requires a gui interface without some form of window manager you're probably going to be hard pressed to find terminal only programs to do that. (Gaim doesn't have a terminal version (at least not that I know of))