I spent yesterday upgrading mplayer to the latest version and compiling it with the gui - I felt like a gui after having controlled mplayer for a long, long time only with a keyboard. It compiled and installed with no trouble.

Having done that, I thought it was high-time that I sorted out Firefox so I could watch Windows media and Quicktime movies from within the browser. I started off trying mozplugger, but all I got were grey boxes. Fiddling with the mozplugger configuration file didn't help - the original configuration seemed fine to me.

In frustration, I uninstalled mozplugger and installed plugger. But compilation failed because I needed a library that was part of the package libxt-dev.

Doing the fateful apt-get install libxt-dev, I saw that my whole x11 would be upgraded to the new Xorg. I knew that Xorg was coming, but I didn't want it just yet. I also know big upgrades like this usually break, especially when you're running Debian Sid.

I crossed my fingers and pressed return. Would I ever be able to use my computer again?

It took a long time to download. One of the packages xserver-xorg didn't install properly, because a pre-install script was causing an error. None the less, I tried to start X. No luck, neither xdm nor kdm nor startx worked.

Having seen the xserver-xorg error I spent a long time trying to figure it out, finally jumping on to IRC to see whether anyone had heard of it. I got no replies.

I unpacked the xserver-xorg package manually only to find that there was nothing actually in it. So, it didn't do anything. The error, therefore wasn't what was stopping any pretty video.

Then, I got a brain-wave, I tried seeing whether there were any programs called 'Xorg'. There was. I ran it X windows came up. It didn't actually show any windows because there was no window manager, but I could see that it was working.

So, it was clear that neither xdm not kdm where actually starting the new Xorg server, they were still trying to start the old X server, which of course was no longer there.

The first thing I checked was whether the symlink from /etc/X11/X was pointing to an X server. It wasn't. It didn't do anything (it was pointing to /bin/true).

I tried getting /etc/X11/X to point to /usr/bin/Xorg, but that didn't solve the problem.

Unless you're an X whizz, which I'm not, it is difficult to know where to look among the huge number of scripts that govern the running of X, xdm and kdm. This page helped.

To get XDM to work I had to one line of /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers to read:

:0 local /usr/bin/Xorg vt7 -dpi 100 -nolisten tcp

And for kdm I had to edit /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc so that the ServerCmd option was set properly:

ServerCmd=/usr/bin/Xorg

This got X windows and kdm working normally. Well, almost normally; many of the fonts were looking funny, especially in emacs. For some reason the font server, xfs, had been uninstalled. I reinstalled it.

Now, back to plugger. It still wouldn't compile because the package that had started all this, libxt-dev, hadn't been installed. I installed it. Fired up Firefox and went to Apple's Quicktime page to see whether it worked. It didn't.

So, yes, I have cutting-edge X Windows, but I still can't watch Quicktime and Windows Media movies in my browser.