I need some insight when installing gnome2 on Debian woody ... please!

["Jeff Vincent" <JVINCENT novell com>]

Hey all, 
 
I am trying to upgrade to GNOME 2.0 using apt and pointing my sources.list to :
 
deb  http://people.debian.org woody/gnome2 woody gnome2
deb-src  http://people.debian.org woody/gnome2 woody gnome2
 
When gdm2 came up the first time, it attempted to start 5 times then said:

     Failed to start the display server serveral times in a short time period; disabling dislpay :0
     gdm_slave_xioerror_handler: Fatal X error - Restarting localhost:1

In looking at the log files that I could find (XFree86.0.log, daemon.log, syslog), there was a problem w/ PEX fonts, one of the devices in XF86Config-4 and what appeared to be a problem w/ gconf.  To fix it, I installed xfs and xfonts-pex, I removed all packages that had the "gnome" name in them, did a dpkg --purge on all of them, grep'd for all possible remaining files/directories containing gnome or gdm.  I then reinstalled gnome2 and gdm2.
 
(BTW: the gdm2.prerm - pre remove script looks for /etc/init.d/gdm2 but it seems to get installed as just gdm)
 
Still, I got the same behavior.  I then compared my gdm.conf w/ a co-worker using Debian on different hardware and his GDMCHOOSER was set to gdmchooser while mine was set to gdmlogin.  I switched mine to gdmchooser, and then was able to get the login screen to start and come up.

However, when I attempt to log in, an error dialog flashes so quickly that I can't read it and then the display manager restarted.  If I click on the icon's showing the Language/System menus, it also restarts the display manager (equivalent to pressing <CTRL><ALT><BACKSPC>).  I can't see anything in XFree86.0.log or syslog that indicates any glaring problems.

I did notice some messages relating to gconf like:

     user.log:GConf server is not in use, shutting down.
or
     user.log:Failed to send buffer.

I don't know what those messages mean.  I then noticed that gnome2 installed gconf2, but gconf was still installed, so I thought that the uninstall of the old gnome just missed something and I redid the entire process above of removing everything gdm or gnome related, including gconf, then reinstalled gnome2 and gdm2.  This time I wasn't able to get completely installed due to errors in the eog2, gdm2, gedit, metacity and gnome2 installation.  It was looking for /etc/gconf/schemas/gedit.schemas, /etc/gconf/schemas/metacity.schemas, etc.  So I removed/purged everything AGAIN, reinstalled gconf then reinstalled gnome2 and gdm2.

However, I still get the problem w/ the missing schemas files.  I don't know where they should be coming from.  I would expect that the schema files would get installed w/ the gnome2 versions of those packages.

Does anyone have any suggestions/insight/perspective on what I am doing wrong?  I thought it might be an XFree server configuration problem, but it worked w/ GNOME 1.4 and I was getting a GUI login before I broke it again, so I am not so sure that is the case, unless it is a device problem for a device that is non-existant (like the sound card).  

Are there any utilities that are better than the xf86config program that can help me configure the xserver (xfree86 ver. 4.1.0-17) on Debian?

Thanks,

Jeff