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I did a non-sense operation and broke my X-server, period.
The sad fact is that it was late and I did not remember what I removed, I think it was a package with python in its name...
I know that this does not provide useful information, so I'm reinstalling X from the base, do you know how to achieve this from the live cd boot? I cannot do it from the command line because it keeps flashing and does not get all the keystrokes, just once every two or three attempts.

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That's probably just the terminal within the GUI that will have that problem since it's being drawn by the X server. Ctrl + Alt + F1 through Ctrl + Alt + F6 are all console based virtual terminals. The first terminal is probably being used by the X server. You can press Ctrl + C to stop it's execution, then proceed with the following steps:

Fully remove your X server:

sudo apt-get remove x-window-system-core xserver-xorg

then reinstall:

sudo apt-get install x-window-system-core xserver-xorg
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None of the consoles is free of that flickering problem. The recovery mode one is ok though. I did as you said, I looked in the logs and it says "Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module", I'll Google this... – Alberto Zaccagni Nov 30 '09 at 20:18
what does startx do? – John T Nov 30 '09 at 21:06
Startx fails, I found two things: 1) it cannot find my monitor 2) it says "Failed to load the NVIDIA kernel module. I also found some errors on update-manager and update-notifier that seem to need each other, with the latter being broken. That seems to be caused on some python-like lib. That is, the error I made last night :( – Alberto Zaccagni Nov 30 '09 at 21:12
Btw, isn't there a way to mount my "old-Ubuntu" into the live one? I tried mount /dev/sda1 /home/me/mounthere but with no success – Alberto Zaccagni Nov 30 '09 at 21:14
@John: x-window-system-core is the package to install in Ubuntu 6.0 and earlier. Montecristo should probably install xorg instead. Also, startx is the program that starts xwindows. Typically it's started during your startup sequence. – DaveParillo Nov 30 '09 at 21:55
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