Ubuntu LiveCD,editing xorg.conf

Question

someone has edited wrongly my xorg.conf file in /etc/x11/xorg.conf and so my computer wont show anything,just a blank screen.I want to be able to edit the xorg.conf file and delete all the changes made.

I have put in my livecd and i can see my documents from the broken installation and also the xorg.conf file and the changes that were made but the file is read only.

How can i edit this xorg.conf and delete the changes that were made?.

Answer 1

There is one workaround: start your system and wait until it boots up. Press ctrl+alt+F1 to switch to a text console. Log in with your user, and after using sudo, use your favorite editor to edit the xorg.conf. For example:

sudo nano /etc/x11/xorg.conf

About the other question regarding why you can't edit the file from the live cd: there can be more reasons you cannot edit your installed system's files.

Some of these reasons can be:

1. When you boot from the live cd the user that the installer uses when launching a terminal is not root. Therfore you have to execute "sudo -s" at the terminal window to become root so you can edit the file on the already mounted FS.
2. The FS (filesystem) that contains your installed OS is mounted as read-only. In this case you have to remount it as rw.

To detect if a FS is mounted as read-only:

sudo mount /mnt/mount_point | grep ro

If this command returns a line then the mounted FS is mounted as read-only.

To remount a read-only mounted FS as writable:

sudo mount /dev/block_device_id /mnt/ -o remount,rw