Hi, finally I am writing this email from KDE under AMD64 Etch b3. Here is how it worked: 1. Clean network install 2. Install kde-core and kdm (by suggestion of Scott Lair) Everything works well. Just installed KDevelop and compiled a test C++ code. Thanks for all your input! Victor P.S. before I tried '/etc/init.d/kdm stop;startkde' -- it said 'could not connect to xserver' even though I could start x server manually.