Hmm, been a while since I put anything here. How about a tip o’ the month?

Say your graphics card gets all wonky, but you still have a lot of state in your X session which you don’t want to lose. A good thing to try is “sudo chvt 1” to switch to a text console. Then when you bring X back with Alt-F7 or whatever, the X server shifts the card back into graphics mode from a clean slate and then displays everything you have up. Of course, it doesn’t work if it’s the X server itself which is messed up, or if the card’s state is too far gone to switch to text and back.