Not to be looking a gift horse in the mouth… but a few months ago during a routine series of patches and upgrades, an Ubuntu maintainer slipped a peice of buggy code into the the repository turnig my box at home into an overpowered dumb terminal. At first, I thought the video card had finally went tits up, but after going through the message boards using my trusty console based browser, lynx, I was able to find out the new video kernel modules were jacked up, and I needed to roll them back to the previous version. After messing with it on and off for a day, I was finally able to get the GUI back, but on just one screen, rendering the second monitor relatively useless. Well today, I had a few extra cycles, so I decided to give it another go. After downloading the latest restricted drivers, I still had the same problem. I decided to give the factory nVidia drivers another shot, which wiped out X windows again. After a series of installing and uninstalling, lo and behold I got Xorg working again. And to top that off, my dual screens are working again. unfortunately, I couldn’t begin to tell you how I did it. Suffice it to say, I uninstalled the factory nVidia drivers, reinstalled the restricted-modules, nvidia-xconfig, nvidia-xsettings, installed the factory nVidia drivers again, and then copied my known working nVidia dualhead xorg.conf backup to xorg.conf.
Moral of the story… keep good backups of our xorg.conf files.
Open source may have it’s issues at times, but I have had shrinkwrapped software go belly up after applying patches, and sevice packs also, and that software, I had to buy.