Have you selected KDE or Gnome as your default window manager?
If you run xwmconfig, and select KDE or Gnome, it should start when you do startx. This needs to be done for each user.

Thanks for the advice on the program to switch to KDE or Gnome. BTW I got OpenGL working with Red Hat 8.0 with no problems. Its exactly what the ATI drivers need I guess. The only drag is that Red Hat 8.0 is out of date. Sounds like I may have got Linux-Mandrake 9.1 working after all I'm not sure. I may reinstall 9.1. It sucks not having NTFS access (with 8.0) to my XP drive among other things...

NTFS support for either mandrake 9.0 and Red Hat 9 does exist.

They are read only support though. In Man9.0 it comes with the installation but in Red Hat you need to get the rpms as well as editing your fstab file.

But your better off with FAT32 access in both since they can read and write to them.

There should be rpms for older versions of red hat. As for mandrake there could be some too but I am a linux newbie and started with man9.0.

I'm using a knoppix hd install upgraded to debian sid, trying to install the official ati drivers (version Version: 3.2.8 from the ati website, but the same error occurs while trying the drivers from http://www.schneider-digital.de/html/download_ati.html )
downloaded kernel-source-2.4.22-xfs, did a make oldconfig / make deps (compiler = gcc-3.3 , but the same error I get with 3.2 and 2.95)
after that I try run the script provided by ati to build the kernelmodules and I keep on getting this error:
ATI module generator V 2.0
==========================
initializing...
probing for VMA API version...
cleaning...
patching 'highmem.h'...
skipping patch for 'drmP.h', not needed
skipping patch for 'drm_os_linux.h', not needed
doing script based build for kernel 2.4.x and similar
compiling 'agpgart_be.c'...
compiling 'agp3.c'...
compiling 'i7505-agp.c'...
compiling 'nvidia-agp.c'...
compiling 'firegl_public.c'...
In file included from /usr/src/linux/include/../drivers/char/drm/drm_proc.h:37,
from firegl_public.c:278:
/usr/src/linux/include/../drivers/char/drm/drmP.h:932: redefinition of `__cmpxchg'
/usr/src/linux/include/asm/system.h:244: `__cmpxchg' previously defined here
compiling failed - object file was not generated

Now do I need to get a kernel 2.4.22 from kernel.org (without any debian/xfs patches) to give it a try? or is there something else that could solve this?
Thanx in advance

See your output of uname -m, it will tell you what ix86 your actual kernel is optimized for, if you get i386, rebuild the kernel for i586 ...your Debian sources will do just fine.