After the last system upgrade, my USB mouse no longer responds on the 2.6 kernel (It works on 2.4). I think it could be fixed by running "apt-get upgrade" and hoping that there will be something useful in there but I can't access a terminal once it has loaded the KDM.

I've tried the Ctrl + Alt + F? key combination to access a terminal, but this doesn't work. Is there a different combination in MEPIS?

I guess I could use the MEPIS live CD to alter the X Config and force it to fail, so I have a terminal, but this seems a bit drastic!

what you can do is in the grub menu hit the number 3 before you press enter to boot up. that this will do is force it to boot up in runlevel 3, which is before the GUI comes up. however this seems more like a USB module not being loaded than an apt issue, you will have to put the correct module into /etc/modules . As for the ctrl+alt+fN issue I belive kdm will prevent you from using those keys once it loads up until it gets into the environment

hit alt-f2 to open a run dialog box, type "xterm" [enter]. from there log in as root and change your runlevel.