Fix Missing TTY Terminal with nVidia GPU

So I had this long-running problem where as soon as I installed the drivers for an nVidia GPU, I'd lose the terminals (normally accessed by Ctrl-Alt-F1, Ctrl-Alt-F2, etc). The processes were still running, but nothing was visible. This was particularly annoying if I did anything to trash the desktop environment --- couldn't get access to a terminal to fix things.

Turns out the solution though is pretty simple: modify the file /etc/default/grub so that instead of saying "quiet splash" it says "nomodeset" (make a copy of your original grub file first to be safe):

#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset"

Then run sudo update-grub. Upon reboot, the TTYs will be visible again. Spews out the entire boot log to the screen as well, but that wasn't really a concern at all for me.

How to Set Console Title in Cygwin or LXTerminal

To set the title of the console in cygwin:

   echo -e "\033]2;!^\007"

This can be set up as an alias (say, as "t"):

   alias t 'echo -e "\033]2;\!^\007"'

(Taken from a comment in this post).

Update: To do the same thing in LXTerminal (used in lxde):

    echo -ne "\033]0;"WindowTitle"\007"

(Taken from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=448614).

Or as a function in .bashrc (since bash aliases don't take parameters):

t() {
  echo -ne "\033]0;$*\007"
}