I swallow, my throat hoarse and dry. My stomach rumbles, furious at my blatant disregard for tonight's supper. My eyes burn as they peer through the plastic lenses of my glasses, reading lines and lines of drivel and inconsequential ramblings on the Ubuntu forums and the riff-raff that Google tends to bring to the surface.
Then finally, I spot it. The solution. With trembling hands, I slowly, carefully edit the one simple file that is the root of all of my problems, adding a mere three lines character by character. I double, triple check for accuracy, then :w my changes to the configuration.
Saying a quick prayer, I reboot and watch.
There's the login screen.
Username...
Password...
...
...
And I'm in. Wonderful, I say to myself, my changes didn't make my window manager blow up.
Then comes the test.
cd /usr/local/games/tyrquake-0.56/tyr-glquake -width 1024 -height 768 -bpp 32 -mem 128 -fullscreen

I watch as that wonderful shooter loads...
And plays, the OpenGL extensions perfectly rendering those dated graphics into a slightly shinier and prettier rendition.
I weep tears of joy.

Translated: My Ubuntu Linux install would bork whenever I tried to do anything even remotely graphically intensive, such as run Quake with OpenGL enabled or use a neato screensaver. Turns out it was one tiny teeny itsy bitsy little thing that was causing the problem, but as Murphy's Law ALWAYS WINS, it was the hardest of all of the solutions to find.
Yeesh.
I'm getting some sleep. It's just too bloody late, and I need to head three hours north in the morning. Oh well... that's what Jolt Cola's for, right?