Here is the history, mostly so that people who are in my position know what not to do.

At my new job I was handed a brand new machine from Dell, and told to install what I liked on it. Of course they didn't know exactly what was on it, and had thrown away the receipt so couldn't find out. Not good, but I decided to try and install Debian. Which worked fine until I wound up with X not working. After a couple of wrong turns there, I found that there was a knoppix CD hanging around. I booted that and X worked! Therefore I decided to redo things with booting knoppix, and then doing the install to hard drive from that, then upgrade.

This appears to have been a mistake. First of all the list of hosts that it had was long, and some didn't work right, leading "apt-get update" to crash. Hrm. After some fiddling I wound up with a shorter list in the US, and found that "apt-get dist-upgrade" wanted to uninstall most of KDE. Hrm. On IRC I got the advice that "KDE is in unstable. Just upgrade to unstable and you will be fine." Perhaps..but the version of knoppix that I had had KDE packaged rather differently than it is on unstable. I still was going to remove it. So I began to do upgrades, and install packages, hoping to keep KDE in working order.

Well eventually that got me to a point where apt-get refused to do anything because of broken dependencies, telling me to do "apt-get install -f" to fix things. But "apt-get install -f" always started on the same thing, leading to stopping on a conflict. And "apt-get remove" refused to remove that package because dependencies were messed up. Hrm. But aptitude was willing to run - however it wanted to uninstall all of the KDE packages. :-(

Well I let it do that, and after various invocations of apt-get and aptitude wound up with a working system (I am posting from it). However it is not perfect...

1. I have a ton of broken halfway uninstalled packages (mostly KDE related) hanging around. I would like to clean that up and do some reinstalling...
2. I have X working in a fallback mode with a generic driver. I have a Radeon 9800 that I would like a good enough driver for that I could run the Dell 2000fp flatscreen monitor running in native 1600x1200 mode. (More real estate, more real estate!)
3. Were I Peter I would care that I don't have my undoubtably nice sound card detected. On a work computer I don't care about that, 'nuff said.
4. Suggestions taken on a decent window manager. My definition of decent is gives me lots of real estate, many desktops that I can key between, when I hit "maximize" on a terminal it maximizes up/down and not full screen, and gdm launches it every time by default. I am currently using FVWM and it does everything I need except get launched from gdm.

All suggestions on how to achieve any of the above goals taken, except for "reinstall the system". Any suggestions for useful things that I can do with the system will be taken under consideration. The reason for refusal to reinstall at present is that I have reached a point where I can be productive, and I don't want to waste time reinstalling without very good reason. None of my irritations are good enough reasons IMHO.

Cheers,
Ben

PS In other news I will have a proper place to live on or about September 1, and after I am properly set up there I will be trying to get online from home. After that I will begin playing catchup...