i would give u two options... ssh through another machine... or debian chroot... that will allow you to modify things by commandline.

how did u run gdmsetup?

BTW ive installed both openoffice and gimp... and very oddly i get better performance from debian ina chroot...

and wifi radar is a PITA that takes FOREVER to run. But wireless works... i still get disconnected randomly though.

eta: oh and i copied the maemo /usr/share/X11/kdb over to debian and moved to originals out of the way... it made no impact on booting debian.. keyboard still worked - and now it works in chroot.. having issues getting mpd to start though.