I bought a an HP dv9000z and lathough I know it wasn't the best for linux support I did research and even found instructions from someone who had everything working. It seemed that installing a 64 bit distro would allow all the hardware to work. Well I installed Debian Etch just fine and added the noapic, when I tried to boot, I got no GUI whatsoever, it just sits there witha black screen. If I boot into single user mode I can login and work with the CLI fine. The graphical install works fine on the computer. But no one has mentioned that the GUI takes a long time to come up, I would imagine it shouldn't take forever to come up not with a 256MB 7600 video card, and 2 gigs of RAM. Anyone have any idea what may be wrong.

When you did the install, did you remember to select the "Desktop" option?

What's the output of dmesg and what are the contents of your xorg.log file (/var/log/Xorg.log, I think)?

yea I installed the desktop option, I'll give you the dmesg as soon as I get a chance, and I'll check the log, my xorg config file seems to be in order.

I got the GUI up, I had to use the nvidia drivers....now wrestling with getting ndiswrapper to work with my wpa encrypted wireless