It's a rite of passage. All new Linux users must face that ultimate test of courage and conviction: Fixing a broken video card configuration. One minor slip-up - selecting an unsupported resolution, choosing the wrong screen model - and Bam! Your desktop is replaced by a set of squiggly, pulsating lines (I'm partial to the purple ones myself). Welcome to the wild, wacky world of Linux video settings where learni It’s a rite of passage. All new Linux users must face that ultimate test of courage and conviction: Fixing a broken video card configuration. One minor slip-up – selecting an unsupported resolution, choosing the wrong screen model – and Bam! Your desktop is replaced by a set of squiggly, pulsating lines (I’m partial to the purple ones myself).Welcome to the wild, wacky world of Linux video settings where learning to recover from a malformed xorg.conf file is your price of admission to the big “open source” dance. Every time I run into this issue (and I’ve seen it at least once under Dapper, Edgy, Feisty and now Gutsy since the Tribe 4 release) I start feeling all nostalgic about my early Windows NT days.Way back when (circa 1992), we “bleeding edge” NT users had to suffer through all sorts of video card-related maladies. And with no command line-only environment to boot into, we were truly and utterly hosed. Our only hope of salvation was to scrounge-up a compatible video card/monitor combination and then undo our changes if/when we managed to login to our NT desktops. Then someone at Microsoft got smart (hey, it happens) and realized that, if you’re going to develop a GUI-centric OS with no underlying (accessible) command console, you need to provide a (relatively) fool-proof way for users to recover from a mal-configured graphics driver. Thus, the “VGA boot” option was born and NT (later 2000, XP and now Vista) users rejoiced.Fast forward to today and you can get that same feeling by tinkering with any number Linux distributions, including our beloved Ubuntu. Yes, with Ubuntu, you too can experience what it’s like to render your desktop inaccessible. In fact, with Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon,” you now have two (count ‘em, two) separate (redundant?) control panels from which to launch your video mal-configuration odyssey: Screen Resolution and Screen and Graphics. So, everybody, let’s call up Mr. Peabody, fire-up the “wayback machine,” and party like it’s 1992! With Ubuntu! Bonus Tip: When fumbling around the cryptic Linux command line (the accepted way to fix most X11-related video maladies), use “nano/pico” – and not the indecipherable “vi” – to edit the xorg.conf file.Next-Up: You call these applications? Software DevelopmentSmall and Medium Business