let's say you have debian potato running and all is right with the world. X (startx or via kdm) is lovely, and console/virtual terminals run flawlessly with gpm as well.
the mouse moves its pointer all over the place at your bidding, and you can select text at the console whether in vi or less or lynx; and within X your mouse can select text via konqueror (kde) and quickie notepad-like accessories and in rxvt/xterm/etc. coming from the mac background, i'm used to being able to command-c (control-c) to COPY whatever's been selected via mouse, which i can then command-v (control-v) PASTE into just about any place that would accept typed text. how does a debian/potato user do the cut-and-paste dance? - select text and copy it from console, switch to X, paste into a netscape or konqueror html form field - select text from kwrite, running under kde/X, and paste it into a vim session in 'paste' mode running in a krxvt X window - select text from a konqueror file listing within X (say, a collection of file names) and switch to console to paste it into a vim session there... altho i'm guessing that each frickin application developer implemented his own personal preferences, resulting in a plethora of inconsistent methodologies, i'll ask this question in the singular form: what's the incantation? -- with linux, everything is possible. and nothing worthwhile is easy. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sourceforge.net/projects/newbiedoc -- we need your brain! http://www.dontUthink.com/ -- your brain needs us!