Because I hate myself or something, I got out my windows/linux laptop and upgraded it from “Edgy Eft” to “Feisty Fawn.” X11 stopped working. Great. Whatever.
I decided to give it the old “reinstall.” See how the Feisty installer works. Welllll…. I had some adventures there. Always a challenge to get linux going on some wacky old laptop, you know? I redid things that worked before and they worked again. (Note to self: the secret code to tell it to use 1280×768 resolution in /boot/grub/menu.lst is ‘vga=797’.)
The thing that amazed me though is that I still had to do this to get sound working.  Was it only a year ago that I was messing with that? It seems like forever.