Hi all, many many thanks for your suggestions.
Finally it was the right thing to get a precompiled kernel and boot this one with BootX. The system came up again without problems. I couldn't hesitate to try this kernel compiling again. This time I made the "make modules" and "make modules_install" immediately after "make vmlinux". And again, no problem booting my newly compiled kernel. And even more: with the new kernel my X colormaps are now correctly interpreted and the mouse is working fine too :-) Bye, bye Manuel PS: Debian is running on a Apple Macintosh G3/233MHz with 160MB RAM, 4.3 GB IDE harddrive and 4 MB VRAM ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Manuel Sickert Institut Curie, Section de Recherche 11 rue Pierre et Marie Curie, 75231 Paris Cedex 05 Tel: (33) 01 42 34 64 60/83 Fax: (33) 01 40 51 06 36 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++