Shiny new monitor
For Christmas I bought the family a new video card, so that we could actually use the full resolution of our existing monitor. Joke was on me though, because the new video card used a new kind of video cable that our existing monitor couldn't connect to. So I had to wait a little while to get a new monitor.
MonitorI was also reminded of something very important when dealing with a Linux machine: the GUI tools are terrible. They look really nice, but about all that they're good for is putting the machine into an unusable state. After I was locked out of the desktop by my attempts to use the GUI, I had to revert to old school command line configuration. Which turned out to be really fast. I booted using an old configuration for the GUI and it came up immediately with the right settings.
The important take away here: don't get too dependent on the GUI. The command line will always be faster, easier and powerful.
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While I certainly agree that the command line will always be more valuable to someone that takes the time to learn it, I disagree that it will always be easier. In this case, for example, you likely needed to know the syntax for xorg.conf. While easier for someone familiar with the syntax, that would be a nightmare for many users that had never delved into it. Many, if not all of the major distributions ship ncurses based GUIs for system configuration just for these type of problems. Basically, everything a typical user should need to recover from a botched x-config is available in these tools, so X should be easily installable.
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