I've just downloaded Debian 3 and trying to get it running on a Compaq Armada M700 laptop which has a thumb-stick mouse in the keyboard. During the install it asked for which type of mouse port I used and didn't know which to choose. The install completed but when I try to startx it returns to the command line with errors about not being able to open the mouse input device. I need help on how to troubleshoot and configure this properly.

I think that pointing device on the notebook is a ps2 type mouse.
The debain installer doesn't have much mercy on a newer Linux user. I have had problem getting a mouse to work right on Debian.

If you are using XFfree86 then the config for your mouse is in the XF86config file located at
/etc/X11/XF86config

If you are using Xorg then the config file is xorg.conf located at
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
You will have to be root to edit the file. At shell type
su
enter password you wont see anything echoed on screen
Then you will need to use a text only editor like mcedit or emacs or joe to edit the file.
The part you want looks something like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection


There are command line tools to help you also.
xf86cfg is a graphic toll
xf86config for manual setting.

If you are new to Debian there is a live CD called Knoppix that has great hardware detection and configuration. It is based on Debian and will run completely from a CD. You can put it into the drive of any machine and boot up the machine with it. You will have to have the machines BIOS set to allow booting from cd. It won't touch an file on the machines hard drive. Not unless you purposely make yourself root and change a mounted drives file. So you can run it on any windows machine too see it work without bothering the windows machine.
You can get it and see how it sets its config files up.
http://www.knoppix.org/

Mandrake and Fedora are friendlier to a newer user. But Debian has 7 cd's worth of ready packages to install. The best thing to do is not get frustrated. Stick with it, keep reading all that you can about your distro and where the config files are and what they do. And you will find many knowledgeable people on LQ org.
http://www.hk8.org/old_web/linux/lnut/
http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/
http://tldp.org/
http://www.debian.org/

Good luck

Thanks for the info. I did some more ready on suggested distros for a newbie and went with Mepis. I booted to the CD, it found everyting including the Cisco 802.11 card so I installed it on the hard drive. So far it's working great but I'm still trying to learn all this stuff. In fact, I'm replying to this on the Mepis system after installing Firefox.