This has been a real adventure. The good news is, it's incredibly easy to recover the factory settings on this machine. Shut it down, press and hold F9, and a menu will come up that gives three options, one of which is to recover the factory settings. It takes about 30 seconds.
The bad news is, after I made the whole conversion (rather successfully, I might add) I turned off the machine and went to another hotspot and, although I had the little blue light that said I had a signal, I couldn't get the browser (any browser- I tried a few) to hook up to the signal. That may be because of the process that I followed to free up disk space. These machines only have 4G of disk space, and it can be difficult and frustrating to try to decide what to delete. I honestly do not know why my connection went away. I do know that I deleted the email, iGoogle, and Wikipedia helpers. I'm 57 and have been doing Windows for a long time so I suspect that it was because I deleted the AOL helper. I would ask that this get posted far and wide so that someone would please help me configure my internet connection after I get the KDE installed again. Oddly enough, I have not been able to latch on to ambient unlocked signals with this machine at all, and of course I would like to do that. I was just told that many routers are firewalled, which I didn't know because I lived in an apartment complex that had an open signal. I wouldn't mind advice about locating and hooking up though. So I did none of this from the terminal. I went into synaptic and deleted everything I thought I could delete safely, like StarOffice and the games. One quick thing about the games is that for some reason if I tried to delete Sudoku, it hung up the whole process. Don't try to delete Sudoku. I won't list the other things I deleted in synaptic (“remove completely”). Just be careful. Then again, it's easy to recover factory settings. I just added the repository deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free and installed kicker and ksmserver from there. I'm pretty sure that wine is in that repository, but if not, it's not hard to find. For me, installing wine from the repository worked a lot better. It is a cranky program, and there is a popup window that says that it's buggy and often hard to deal with. I wanted to install wine so that I could install Cricket Broadband. I haven't been able to do that, and I've gotten mixed reviews about the service. If I manage to install it I'll post that too- it's the only prepaid broadband wireless service there is, but it may not even be worth it. I am now waiting for someone generous to explain to me how to configure an internet connection in KDE before I can make the final change. I had to go back to factory settings to get hooked up. So again, I just deleted everything I could from the hard drive, put in that repository, and installed it from that repository. I'm going to find and install wine separately before I make the change back to KDE, just to avoid any problems with that. I did all this without any use of the terminal or any commands, because of the terminal command problems I wrote about above. In KDE, the Debian command su && worked okay, but now that it's back to Xandros, I'm having the same problems with the terminal. And of course, you're on your own with this. KDE is really nice once installed, but, again, you're on your own. -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/RE%3A-Newbie-but-nevertheless-sincere--replacing-Xandros-GUI-on-Asus-900a-with-KDE-tp21836105p21923769.html Sent from the Debian KDE mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]

