If you’ve played around with installing a lot of distributions you’ve made a mistake atleast once, and broken your partition table. Or atleast I hope so, because I’ve done it more than my fair share of times. The most recent was when I was installing Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit and I crashed GPartEd while partitioning. My problem was that I already had four partitions [1] on the hard drive and I also wanted a swap partition but I made a mistake somewhere along the line and ended up with a logical partition outside of an extended partition. This is very bad stuff.

What happened next was terrifying, both GPartEd and Ubuntu’s ubiquity installer claimed the entire drive was empty. Now this is very bad, because there are files on this computer that I adore and would hate losing. I was just about ready to kill myself when I found a forum thread on the Ubuntu Forums[2] that mentioned testdisk. It’s in the universe repositories and you can get it by enabling Universe in System » Administration » Software Sources and then running:
sudo aptitude install testdisk
It also creates a backup of your partition table if you want. I had a broken one but I wanted more than one shot at it so I emailed myself the backup and got ready to put my hope to the test. When it happened it was almost anticlimactic, three menus later (all in a simple user friendly style) I had my partition table back! And all the data stored on the drive was accessible once more. I was incredibly happy about that, and made a small donation to the software author. The single most useful piece of software I’ve ever used on Linux.

[1] Ankit Chaturvedi on Partitions
[2] My Forum Thread with the problem.

Mplayer has many video output drivers available and though half of them can only be used under X11, there are quite a few that give good results without the need for an x-server. You can see what video output drivers you have enabled by typing (at a terminal):
mplayer -vo help
I have the default installation from Ubuntu, so I have quite a lot of drivers installed, and can use them without any further trouble. If you compiled from code, you may need to have enabled them then.

So here are the drivers I tried out:

• Framebuffer device drivers: fbdev and fbdev2. Use mplayer -vo fbdev filename or mplayer -vo fbdev2 filename .
• SDL: SDL probably gives the best results of them all, but doing it in a virtual terminal while running X seems to crash the OS. SDL is not actually dependent on X and you can use it without X running. Just remember to set a good video mode or you’ll get 16 colors. Use mplayer -vo sdl filename
• aa: Ascii Art (aalib) is a fun way to look at videos but it gets old quick if you haven’t set the terminal to a high enough resolution. Too low and everything will look like gibberish but with a higher resolution you can make out quite a lot of details. Use mplayer -vo aa filename to get ascii art versions of your video. Really high ‘Cool Factor’ =)
• libcaca: Colour Ascii Art, similar to aa but some text is in colour and the detail is usually better. Haven’t been able to get it going under just a virtual terminal though. Use mplayer -vo caca filename
• vesa: Use the VESA VBE 2.0 output. Haven’t been able to get this to work yet.
• cvidix: Console Vidix. You need to have a working vidix driver. I don’t know how to get one yet.