I tried the Ctrl + Alt +F1 and that does work, so one symptom is down to not paying attention when Mark and Adam told me how to do it.

I have set /etc/hosts to the same format as my Slackware partitions but still I can get to gdm, log in and then the system hangs at "initializing system services" and after a time goes back to grey with the cursor, although I did get the KDE start-up tones whilst altering /etc/hosts from root. I also re-checked and reset xf86config, although I have set it exactly the same as the same version of X which runs my Slackware the screen image is just a tad squashed.

Note please do not assume that because I can work VI enough to rewrite /etc/hosts that I can do much else from the command line.