Brainbeer has offered us the following clue :

> A few more things I forgot about...I have nvidia card with the kernel and
> glx installed and splash screen going. But I am only getting about 10-15
> frames a second on glxgears. The memory size is in my xorg.conf, but still
> its slow. Secondly, on kdm, only root shows up as a clickable
> selection...any way to fix these?

10-15 fps is quite slow. I get 320 fps with my Athlon XP3000 with nforce
chipset.

This is part of my xorg.conf :

Section "Module"

# This loads the DBE extension module.

Load "dbe" # Double buffer extension

# This loads the miscellaneous extensions module, and disables
# initialisation of the XFree86-DGA extension within that module.
SubSection "extmod"
Option "omit xfree86-dga" # don't initialise the DGA extension
EndSubSection

# This loads the video 4 Linux module

Load "v4l"

# This loads the Type1 and FreeType font modules

Load "type1"
Load "freetype"

Load "xtt"
Load "speedo"

# This loads the GLX module
Load "glx"
# This loads the DRI module
Load "dri"

Load "GLcore"

EndSection

Section "dri"
Mode 0666
EndSection

You should also compile the kernel with the right options.

To decide which user appears on kdm, start the KDE control center in
superuser mode (kdesu kcontrol) and go to "system administration",
"connexion management", "users" (sorry, my menu is in French, I translated
more or less well) then you can decide which user may appear and which
image is associated to them.
There is certainly a CLI way or a .conf file to do that. Some extremists
here won't like you run kcontrol in superuser mode, follow my eyes,
(obviously some like it since there is a superuser button in the KDE menu).