I have a couple quesitons about that have come up while installing xfree86 on my debian laptop.

1. I downloaded the required files to install XFree86 onto my laptop. Do I also have to have KDE or a desktop program to install as well or can I get XFree86 working before I attempt KDE? (I don't completely understand what KDE does. Does it just make XFree86 look more visually pleasing?)

2. My laptop has a ps2 port on the back which I will try to dig up an old mouse for. I tried to get the touchpad on my twinhead pentium 100 to work with XFree86 but it's beyond me. Is there anything written for someone trying to get a laptop touchpad mouse working out there? The install instructions and books I have all address installation on a desktop and don't really mention it. Hopefully at least the ps2 port will work for now.

Thanks, Mark.

Which Linux Distribution are you using ?

1) You can install xfree86 before you install kde. KDE is a complete desktop environment, where as when you just install xfree86 you will just have a very basic window manager.

2) Not sure about the touchpad.

if you apt-get install kdm xserver x-server (or xserver-common and x-server-common) and kde (if you want to use KDE) then you will be walked though the dpkg-reconfigure xserver tool for all of the basic setup for your GUI.

on the first log in for KDE you will be walked though yet an other wizard to customize your GUI desktop.

as for the touchpad, sometimes mine works, other times it does not, but most times it is to sensative, and i dont know how to adjust it so i would rather not have it active and just use either a USB or PS/2 mouse as you will be.

I think I finally got XFree86 working correctly with my PS/2 mouse. It took hours because I didn't have access to a computer with internet and I the config program kept freezing. I figured the PS/2 port is called /dev/psaux and that fixed a lot of the problems. I'm not going to bother with the touchpad.

My laptop is a P100 with 16MB of ram and a good sized harddrive. Should I use fvwm which uses less memory or do I have enough memory to run KDE. I went to KDE.org to try and find out how much RAM I need for it but didn't find anything. If I run fvwm are there a lot of KDE programs that I will not be able to run? Thanks for your insight. Mark

i personally would not run a modern KDE or Gnome with less then 32M ram, but that is just me.