Congrats on reaching the great 1000 roll-over !

Cheers,

mj

It just shows that I've spent a lot of time chatting on the opinion threads.

what is vga because i did that and the only one that mentioned vga was this: vga compatible controller: Texas Instruments TVP4020 [permedia 2] (rev 01)

Yes, apparently that's your graphics card. A Google search revealed that many people seem to use the "glint" driver with that specific graphics controller. Try that in "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86".

i don't know how much memory it has

You can leave the memory undefined. Xserver does some autoprobing of your hardware while it starts so you should be able to skip most of the questions by just pressing Enter. Defining the driver for your graphics card and the refresh values for monitor seem to be among the most important facts for a successful X configuration and it would be preferable that you can set them correctly.

should i just type startx when im done or should i reboot

You need an .xsession or .xinit file in your home directory before "startx" works. Maybe you should try rebooting first to see if you are greeted by kdm.

i rebooted and its still black and white saying debian login

p.s.

what is a .xsession or .xinit file

You can test your X configuration file by typing: If the configuration file is good, you should get a kind of greyish screen and an X shaped mouse cursor. To exit the test, just press the three keys Ctrl+Alt+Backspace simultaneously.

If the test is successful, you can create the .xsession file with the following command

it didnt work let me make sure i typed it right

it says the same thing as when i type "startx"

Hmm... Supposing the Google information on the graphics driver is correct, it shouldn't be too difficult to find out what's wrong with your X configuration. Then you can run "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86" again and correct the settings.

Every time X tries to start it writes a log file to /var/log/XFree86.0.log and you can view it with the following command: Pay special attention to lines that start with (EE) because those mark errors in the X startup procedure. At the end of this log file there should be a short explanation why X refuses to start. Maybe you could post here that final error message -- and, ideally, also the lines that start with (EE)?

it says command not found

Well, that message isn't very informative. But nevermind, I just remembered that there's an utility that is supposed to configure X automatically. That might be now worth a try, or what do you think?

The utility is called xdebconfigurator and you can install it with "apt-get install xdebconfigurator". I haven't used it myself but apparently you just become root and type "xdebconfigurator" to start the utility and it should take care of the rest. Tell us how it goes, I'm curious to hear if it actually works as advertised.