Further adventures of the Eee

So, yesterday, I tried the manual installation towards the Advaanced Full Desktop using this guide.
The installation was long (15 min d/l with the 235 kB/s speed I have here) but seemed to go fine until I got a last minute error. Unfortunately, I saved it to a sticky note and not online which was subsequently lost when I was forced to clean restore (ie BOTH hard disks had to be re-formatted).So, I have no record of what the error was.
However, after rebooting, no evidence whatsoever of KDE being available, installed or active was available -- in particular, no Full Desktop Button was visible.
So at this point I did a terminal " startfull.sh". This semed to disable X and I couldn't get it back even after a reboot (just a black screen with a regularly reappearing white X on a black screen -- nothing more.
So at this point there was no option but to do a restore which consists of rebooting while holding down the F9 key.
The first time I chose to reformat only the /user partition but this did not make the system bootable again.
Then I reformatted both disks and this went fine.
Now I set about getting things back to where they were before I hosed my system (although I don't understand what went wrong as I believe I followed the instructions to the letter).

1. Installed Opera from this guide. However, rather than the 9.52 version of Opera mentioned in the guide, I installed the 9.60b1 Debian Etch version (as a .deb) from here. I then installed it with this command

sudo dpkg -i opera-version.deb

I had earlier installed the same fileusing the Eee GUI installer and this seemed to go fine. In addition, it actually put a Opera icon under the Internet tab. (In this case ctrl-alt-n opened a Firefox preferences page)
However, I subsequently found that the text-to-speech install as described below, just not work with this install of Opera.

2. Text-to-speech in Opera allows you to highlight text, right click and choose Read This to get the computer to read the text aloud. I had a problem getting it to read Portuguese text as described in this post which also shows how to do the full install.

3. Gimp install using the guide in this thread which also gives a lot of useful information on additional repos and repo pinning. Note that no Gimp icon shows up but it can be launched with Ctrl-Alt-g
A further very useful and thorough article on repo addition is here.

4. Chromium browser was installed from here (I d/l'ed the Ubuntu/Debian package as a .deb and installed it with
sudo dpkg -i
Got some minor install error but doesn't seem to have affected anything. Chromium must be launched from a terminal as no icon nor ctrl-alt-x is available for its launch.