> A short look at the system shows that xlibs-dev will pull in many other
> *-dev packages, among them libsm-dev which contains a symlink libSM.so.

in fact they should. It appears that there is some issue with Debian packages
since my system had been upgraded from woody, and the structure of some
packages changes, i.e. files were moved between packages. I think the
best way is to do a clean install of Debian. I am sure this will solve things.

-- 
Georg Schwarz    http://home.pages.de/~schwarz/
 georg.schwarz@freenet.de  +49 178 8545053