Ubuntu + Beryl = Computing Hell
My Dell has just survived a trip from Hell – installing Beryl. How doth mine computer screweth? Let me count thy ways.
Installing Beryl the first time was a snap, just added the repositories, installed the beta nVidia drivers (yes, yes, I know I was looking for trouble) then installed Beryl and Emerald. But Beryl refused to start. I figured that it was the X.org configuration. Easy, just a minor change to the X.org configuration file, right?
Wrong! I decided to start from scratch. So uninstalled everything and reinstalled it again. This time it refused to install. So I added and removed a lot of repositories (thankfully backing up my apt-get sources file). Then it worked.
Post-installation, the windows looked cool, but the window borders were nowhere to be seen.
So I decided to remove Beryl. Easy…just uninstall the programs and reinstate the old drivers.
Too bad, the programs uninstalled fine, but the drivers refused to revert back. apt-get recognized the beta driver to be a newer version and refused to let me revert back to the official nvidia-glx.
As such, I had to change back the open source ‘nv’ driver, then install the nvidia-glx driver. But it needed the nvidia-kernel package, which wasn’t present in the repositories. So I had to manually download it. 
All in all, reinstatement of my computer took 3 hours. Not the best way to spend my time.
