New (to Debian) user with some (what else?) questions

[Maury Merkin <merkin@his.com>]

Hi,

New user here.  With, no doubt, a few questions you might have already
answered forty-four hundred times this week

Hey.  What else are new users good for?

But I'm only new to Debian.  I've been using Linux since late 1994.
Started with Slackware and somewhere along the way switched to RH.

Anyway, I installed Debian (potato) this am and all went pretty well.
Except:

[1]  My user (i.e. not "root") does not have permission to start X.  I
have no idea which file(s) is/are actually forbidden to me and, before I
start groping around and resetting permissions helter skelter, I was
wondering if anyone here might tell me the canonical way to do this
under Debian.

[2]  Somewhere along in the installation process, I was confronted with
a series of questions regarding something called "Zope" (I think it
was).  I have no idea what Zope is or does.  And I simply left all of
the fields (having to do with log-on and passwords and such) blank.
Please, someone tell me where to find information about Zope, such as:
what is it?  where do I go back now and (re-)configure it properly (if
necessary).

Last question is anticipatory.  I'm used (as I mentioned before) to the
RH way of doing things, in the instant case, handling my ppp dial-up
account.  At first I fought it hard, but then decided to try to do
things RH's way and, lo! and behold!, everything worked pretty well.
But now I'm gonna be using Debian, and I'd like to learn the Debian
way.   So,

[3]  What command will I use to dial-in to my ISP?  Ditto for hang up?
How do I set it up so that my user (again, not "root") can dial and
disconnect?

I s'pose that's it for the moment.  Any assistance will be graciously
appreciated.

Maury