Which distro for pc with no CD Drive

Are you root?

In order to run apt-get, you need to be running as the "root" user. You can either log in with username "root" or you can log in as a normal user and then use the "su" command to become root.

The first step is to pick a "desktop". The two big ones (both in popularity and resources usage) are KDE and Gnome. I've used both. Between those two, I lean towards KDE at the moment, but mostly I use XFCE.

The "stable" release of Debian (which is what you probably have installed) may or may not have recent versions of some stuff. You might want to upgrade to either "testing" or "unstable" before you go too much further.

For XFCE4, I'd recommend at least using the "testing" versions so you get XFCE 4.2. It looks like the versions of KDE and Gnome that are in "stable" are fairly recent.

After upgrading (if you want to) all you need to do is log in as root and do one of the three commands below:

apt-get install xfce4 apt-get install kde apt-get install gnome

Sounds like it.

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