Silly mistake in X config renders screen useless

Hey all,

I was playing around with a dual monitor setup last night and found
myself editing the X configuration in an attempt to have both the
laptop's LCD and the CRT functioning at the same time from the ATI
card in the Gateway M675. Somehow I made a mistake. I know there's a
backup configuration file (an xorg conf program said so) in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.20080629 or something. The laptop will boot up, all
the way to the startx initiliazation, and then hang, and then the fans
start screaming like crazy and I can't CTRL+ALT+DEL or (CTRL)+ALT+Fx.
So that's not good. I was trying to CTRL+C and CTRL+X out ouf the
bootup script level when it got to the point when it was just about to
do startx, but this didn't stop gdm from running.

Any suggestions for getting the configuration back to the laptop's
liking? And after that I'd like to get the CRT functioning, apparently
adding in new sections into the xorg.conf file wasn't enough to make
it work, and I have, in fact, been running through the majority of the
links that Google has been turning up for me, so maybe I'm missing a
good tutorial on throwing up dual monitors? I was reading off of some
tutorials on xinerama, X11, the one on the gentoo wiki, and the
various tutorials available on the ubuntu forums.

I'm downloading a livecd so I can go poke my nose into the hdd in the
worse case scenario, but this will take a while, and in the mean time
maybe some debian user can help me out?

Thank you,
- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/


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