The avatar's actually part of wallpaper called Aqua Tux Clouds by Klowner. It was used on the Slax live CD. (And apparently Lindows used his work in a Flash marketing piece w/o attribution, according to a Slashdot post.) It's a really cute wallpaper!

Anyway, Trooper11's problem sounds like the one I had after installing stock Debian Sid from CD, that I never did resolve: X Windows didn't agree with my graphics card. Somehow, Knoppix worked fine using the "nv" driver, but Sid didn't. Monitor goes blank switches to "power saving mode". (I gave up and just installed Kanotix instead!)