One thing i found a little annoying when trying to make X startup in KDE or gnome was when it messed up there was no way out (i ended up booting parted magic via the network - a nice little linux tool in general). So its worth doing the following IMHO: First, edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and find the line that says: [code] Option "DontVTSwitch" "yes" [/code] and change is to [code] Option "DontVTSwitch" "no" [/code] Then edit /etc/inittab and find the line: [code] #2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2 [/code] and uncomment so it looks like: [code] 2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2 [/code] Then if you need a text console to mess around with X later on, just hit ctrl-alt-f2 and you'll have a login prompt you can do a text login with... kinda handy in some situations.