KDE not working, startx scrolling
 

When I boot into debian, kdm comes up, I type in my name and password, but the screen flicks, and then it returns to kdm. Any ideas?
Also when I'm in the terminal I type startx and I get scrolling, just blank scrolling. It won't stop even after ctrl-z. I have to hit the power button to stop then boot back in. ANy ideas?

Please post your X config and some hardware details.

It's a compaq 2104US laptop
265MB shared memory
30GB hardrive
broadcom wireless radio
synaptics touchpad
CDRW/DVD drive
15" screen

Were do I find the Xconfig? is it the Xfree86-config file?

I'm most interested in your video card.

X config is located at /etc/X11/

Should be XF86Config

my video is and ATI shared 64MB video card, i don't know the exact model number, I'll get the XF86Config posted soon, I've got to get it copied to my FAT32, you'll see it soon.

I just deleted X and KDM and everything else kde related, and I'm going to reinstall it. Thanks anyway though

Reinstall. Yeah, we know you came from using windows ;)

Re: KDE not working, startx scrolling
 

What does ctrl-z do? Did you mean ctrl-c?

You should not use the power button or reset button to interrupt your linux machine. There is a real danger that you will damage your file system by doing this. Instead you should switch to a new terminal (using for example ctrl+alt+F2, ctrl+alt+F3, etc.), log in as root and use one of the following commands:

shutdown -r now (restart)
shutdown -h now (shut down)
poweroff (shut down)

ctrl-c kill the job, ctrl-z stops the job. Yeah I realized that after that I should be changing terminals. Darthtux, what would you have had me do instead of re-install? the re-install worked, but what would you have had me do differently?

You could have just installed all of kde if it wasn't there
apt-get install kde
or
you could have simply reconfigured X
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

I have had to run the above command before to reconfigure my X but I have never had to uninstall and reinstall packages. There is no reason to. Debian has the dpkg-reconfigure command that works.