[RLUG] debian sarge / x / broken xterm

[n a]

I don't know if it's just been a long day or if I'm retarded, but I put 
Debian Sarge and X on two different laptops (a dell inspiron 4000 and a 
Toshiba Protege 320CT) and xterm doesn't work on either of them because 
"DISPLAY is not set". X boots up fine but I can't get it to _do_ anything 
without the xterm... Google  gets me some other people's problem's with ssh 
and x, and something to do with X and sudo that I can't quite make out...

Any bright ideas as to what I'm doing wrong or what to look for? Am I 
overlooking something glaringly simple? (sorry I'm venting away-from-laptop 
at the moment so I can't recall any useful contents of the rc/conf files...)

thanks

Nick

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