I have serious issues recently with X. I went to snall install fest recently and
got debian installed on my laptop. After much fighting X was made to work with
gnome.

The problem lay in the fact that if I started X I could ctrl + alt + F2 with out
the screen becoming unreadible.

I played with the x config file.I played more.
In the end it was beyond my abilities. So I started from the install over. X
would not work at all. I asked the list for help which got me back to were I was
when I lef the install fest.

Enter knoppix stage left.

I installed knoppix (in which X always worked), and I copied the x config file
to a floppy. I reinstalled Debian and copied the config file.

Now it works.