Some random ramblings...

If your Ubuntu desktop crashes and you lose all your desktop icons, open a terminal and run nautilus to bring it back.

If you have custom made .desktop launchers on the desktop, you can copy the files into /usr/local/share/applications so the Dash Home search can pick it up and execute them.

Location for the Applications Menu of Wine apps?

Here's just to keep track of things.  When wine installs applications, the .desktop files on Wine is dumped in /home/dir/.local/share/applications.  I'm pretty sure it's standard for Gnome desktops, but thought I'd forget about this very quickly.

Oops! Black Screen of Death!

I didn't realize how much my build-dep istall messed up my system until after a reboot when I was greeted by a black screen with a mouse pointer after logging in from GDM. It took a while to figure out what exactly happened and I've also read people blaming PulseAudio for their cases.

Mine, as it turns out, is a different issue. It seems that after all the installing and backporting of Wine, Compiz broke down and everytime I try to start it up, it goes to a black screen. I was ever a huge fan of Compiz/Beryl because the desktop effects just seems useless to me. I was able to fix it by going to Failsafe Gnome Session and then selecting the appearance not to use any desktop effects. I may go around to looking at why Compiz broke, but as for now, I'm just happy to get my desktop back.

Update:
It seems that it's much more serious than I thought. My nvidia drivers, even though they are loading up fine, is not giving me direct rendering. Going to try and install the latest nvidia-glx to see if it helps...