How Envy blew up xorg

Two days ago I installed Ubuntu 7.04 for the n-th time. I am motivated to add a piece every day until I will reach a good substitute for my Windows PC iMac. (Well, windows vs ubuntu is not a fair match...). The installation worked flawlessly. Yesterday I installed ies4linux, aka Internet Explorer for Linux. Runs perfectly on Ubuntu, and allows to navigate sites IE only even if they use M$ proprietary technologies like asp and ActiveX.

So this evening I wanted to install Beryl. Let's see what's did go wrong. [Note: using Vista@work and to Tiger@home, I could not resist installing a lights and candies GUI for linux: my problem.]

Here I found a command to verify the direct rendering, needed to run Beryl:

$ glxinfo | grep direct

$ direct rendering: No

No direct rendering? I had to update nVidia drivers (I have a nVidia video card, of course). I used Envy, an automatic video driver updater for Linux. Ok, let's try. Blam! xorg doesn't starts anymore. Linux isn't Windows, so I log on in text mode, seep through /etc/X11 and rename xorg.conf to xorg.conf.rtfm, and pick xorg.conf.backup (thanks God it's backup day) to xorg.conf.

$ sudo mv xorg.conf xorg.conf.rtfm

$ sudo mv xorg.conf.backup xorg.conf


$ startx, and everything is gonna be all right. No, the average salesman couldn't perform even such a simple repair, and this would have move him/her far away from Linux at least for 10 years. Alberto, please, add a routine to test if at the next reboot the system is running at the required runlevel.
The dwarf (nano, in Italian) is a tribute to nano, the text editor I used to find the difference between xorg.conf and xorg.conf.backup. The command I typed was

$ sudo nano xorg.conf (incidentally, "sudo nano" means "I sweat, dwarf" in Italian, which is rather funny for a terminal command...)

Nano (text editor) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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