Try ctrl-alt-esc in kde to kill processes. ctrl-alt-del shoud be set to reboot and can be configured in kcontrol. Also dropping to ctrl-alt-f[1-6] let's you run "ps fax" to look for the PID of a hanging process which you can usually kill with on of these:
kill PID
killall programname
kill -9 PID

You can also set a ketboard shortcut in kde for xkill

Whatever you do don't reset from the power button, so if everything else fails:
alt-sysrq-s (to sync disks)
alt-sysrq-u (to unmount disks)
alt-sysrq-b (to reboot)

Gee, Debian?? I had some similar probs with it. Tell you what? Take three days off, download gentoo and the gentoo handbook and, with some luck you will be able to install it. It is ultra fast, there are no probs with compatibility and stability. BUT! If you have a Linux guru on hand, he will come in handy during the install. I did that by myself, but i had to install 7 times over. Well, in other words , I recommend Gentoo.

Now that's actually one of the best pro-debian posts I've seen here at LQ

okay, cheers guys.

i think what is actually happening is that the windows driver i am using via ndiswrapper is crashing periodically. when it does, nothing will wake the syetm up. i have tried every key press i can think of. so i have to hard boot and then sometimes, about 1 in 6 times, this has caused something to corrupt in my installation. sometimes 'just' an x-window corruption, other times something more major and i cannot get into linux at all. i am fairly sure my knoppix install is not corrupt because i keep reinstalling it !!! LOL i can't get 'apt-get upgrade' to finish either because the net drivers crash before the process completes, aaaAAARGH ! i'm lookign forward to tryng these other distros out when they arrive. i'm hoping kubuntu will work for me and then i can move to sarge when i'm more fluent, sus i have ordered as a back up plan...

can install multiple distros on one disk btw ?

thanks again for yours helps,

dan

nice one, thanks for this, very useful

You can install as many distros on a hd as you want, just don't make them use the same separate /boot partition.

I'm afraid I disagree: Using a shared /boot partition is an excellent idea

An excellent idea to keep everything in one place but I just saw someone have an interesting problem with a /boot partition with grub from fedora and having kanotix install a kernel to grub.

Welcome to LQ!

You should give SUSE a try. Nothing beats YaST. From my experiences, it has great hardware detection.

If you prefer GNOME, Ubuntu is a very good choice. It's very easy to use as well. But for some reason, I've always had trouble getting multimedia codecs working on it.

There is a really good project called Automatix that solves that problem. It is a graphical installer that installs lots of value-adding software to Ubuntu. Including all the codecs you will evey need.

Norm