Edit: Unfortunately, the images originally included in this post are gone, because of hosting problems in late 2009. My apologies.
I was experimenting with the Hardy beta again today, putting together a remote music station with Consonance, a few terminal applications and the fuzzyflakes screensaver as the desktop window. When it was over and done with, it looked a lot like this.
Catastrophe struck soon after I took that screenshot. I inadvertently removed the xorg package when pulling out rxvt-unicode, then couldn’t get a terminal working again. I still can’t jump to console screens in Ubuntu on this machine, and I had already built an autologin, so I was kind of stuck. Since I have plans for this machine beyond just another Ubuntu music station, I decided to call it the end.
Oh well. Easy come, easy go.
Why don’t you chroot in from a live cd?
I guess I could have, but I already knew it was temporary, and it wasn’t worth the work to fix. Good point though. I probably could have made it into educational challenge, instead of wiping it out so blithely.
if you didn’t lock out the grub/lilo boot prompt you could have used init=/bin/sh and fix things up too.