three issues

[Constantinos Maltezos]

Hi.  I'm new to the list.

I have three issues that I'm hoping someone can help me with.  I have googled 
my butt off and haven't found anything to resolve them.  I've found answers 
that seem to have worked for some, but I have no such luck.

First, a little information.  I'm using Gutsy (7.10).  I have it on a 10 
gigabyte partition on my Compaq Presario V5000 laptop.  It has an AMD Turion 
64 CPU and an ATI graphics chip.  A Broadcom wireless network chip 
(fortunately got that working with ndiswrapper).  And everything is working 
beautifully but for the following issues.

1.  The console.

After I choose to boot Kubuntu from Grub, I get a black screen.  It remains 
black until X starts.  After, if I go to the first console (ctrl+alt+f1), the 
font is huge and the resolution appears to extend below the bottom of the 
monitor.  And then, when I shut down, I get a black screen again.  I've 
installed SVGAlib and futzed around with some console configuration files 
in /etc, but there's been no change whatsoever.  This is particularly 
annoying because I'd like to check out KDE 4 and can't seem to get it into 
the system menu in KDM... which brings me to my second issue...

2. KDM

How the heck to I add a window manager to the login?  I can't find a file 
*anywhere* that has "SessionTypes" in it.  I *really* want to check out KDE 4 
and since I can't use the console, I don't have a lot of options.  Even 
launching Xephyr :1 doesn't help because it can't find xterm (which I've 
installed), which is really okay because I'd rather run KDE 4 by itself.  
I've used the live CD, but can't check out the neato eye candy, I suspect 
because of the lack of hardware acceleration.

3. Kopete Yahoo name lookup

This is minor, but if someone has an answer, I'd appreciate it.  Google has 
shown me that many people have this problem.  Some say that when they run 
Kopete from Konsole, they get a message that it failed, but I don't get 
that - though I do get errors about being unable to create an io-slave 
(twice).  I found one promising suggestion from someone who had fixed the 
problem themselves, but it appears it was referring to an older version (I'm 
guessing) of Kopete where the settings for the Yahoo account allowed you to 
specify a pager server (which the individual had replaced with a Japanese 
server).  I find no such option in mine.

Other than this, everything is great.  I'm so happy to have my Windows 
partition as my second choice - Linux rocks my computing world.  And I'm a 
total convert from SuSE.  When I get around to it, I'm going to install 
Kubuntu on my desktop machine to replace SuSE.  (By the way, any tips for 
replacing an rpm-based system with a deb-based one would be appreciated.)  In 
any case, thanks in advance for any help (or attempt at it) that people can 
give me.

Coz