Hi -
I'm just starting to use debian after a long love-affair with slackware... Yesterday I installed debian with a daily-build netinstall CD and everything went rather smoothly. (I'm running Squeeze with kernel 2.6.26). I didn't initially install a window manager, so today I installed X with
I then installed xfce4 with
which went wonderfully as well. By this time I was impressed by Debian's package management.

However, when I attempted
I got a gray background with an unmovable black "X" cursor - xfce4 refused to load beyond this. At first I thought it was just taking its time to load, but the whole system had frozen. I tried to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace out of X and to Ctrl-Alt-Fn into another session, but neither worked.

I presumed that there was a problem with xfce4, but since I wasn't particularly attached to the WM I decided to install KDE4. I followed the directions here :http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/experimental.html and the install went well.

I rebooted and kde autostarted once I logged in. I was presented with a black background and a decidedly different, but still frozen, cursor. Ctrl-Alt-Backspace didn't save me this time, either.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this and help.

The following guide is really useful for Debian minimal installs:

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=13362

Have a read through and it will show you what X packages are required and how to set the system up.

Thanks for your reply =). The guide filled in many of the holes in my basic knowledge of Debian, so I must thank you for recommending it.

I eventually fixed this problem by installing nvidia drivers. It's possible that the problem was a misconfiguration of xorg.conf and nvidia-xconfig fixed xorg.conf when the app overwrote it, but I'm not entirely sure. I'm just happy everything's working.