Chris, I decided to take your advice and give apt-get another chance, following your settings and recommendations and it worked perfectly. It really is a remarkable and impressive phenomenon.
Thanks. However, it didn't get startx to work, though, but at least it gave me a different error message; that xserver-xfree86 was not fully installed. I did an apt-get to rectify that situation, which it did, then ran dpkg-reconfigure on it, which it did. After all that I'm back to my same old error message on startx again -- can find the mouse. I've tried using (in /etc/X11/XF86Config) for device: "/dev/usbmouse" (which I think is what reconfigure did, does that sound right?) Then "usbmouse" (which is what was in there before and worked) and then "/dev/input/mice". None of these work. When using "/dev/input/mice" the process points out -- correctly -- that there is no such file. This is the exact same problem I had when I set up potato, which took forever to fix, I can't believe I have to go through it all again. My recollection is that it was solved at that time with "usbmouse", but that is not working now. The choices for mouse in reconfigure don't have anything that really seems appropriate (like USB mouse, for instance). Sorry to be back to the same old thing, but do you have any other ideas? Mike P.S: If I haven't said so far, it's a 3-button/wheel Logitech USB mouse.
