stand-alone Gnome

[Dominic Wellington <dominic wellington ntlworld com>]

Sorry if this has been covered before elsewhere, but persistent googling 
hasn't located the necessary info.

I don't want Gnome to handle the login process, but to be bootable by 
using e.g. startx or xinit. I have tried removing gdm from the startup 
scripts, but that completely disables Gnome, leaving me with straight 
IceWM. Starting Gnome from the command line, however, means that it asks 
me to log in again, and I can't quit Gnome without rebooting the whole 
machine!

Can someone point me at a howto that explains how to do this? If it 
makes any difference I'm running Debian-potato, but with 2.4.9 kernel.

Regards,
Dominic