I finally rebooted again and the situation changed significantly. Now the XFree86.0.log says "(II) Open APM successful" instead of failed when trying to login as regular (non-root) user and login works.
You can also see differences in /var/log/messages between first and second boot and /proc/apm is now available. (was't before) So Debian seems to need a reboot after install to work properly? :-( Should this be done automatically? Peter
