Now I've seen everything! I've just installed OpenSUSE 11.2 and have been trying (without success) to install 3d drivers for my ATI card. In my attempts, I somehow managed to royally screw up my X configuration, during my attempts to fix that, while trying to retrieve the X Server man page, all I got was a bunch of beeps and random garbage scrolling on the screen. When I press <ctrl>-c, the scrolling garbage changes to scrolling ASCII-art flames that are white with blue tips. Never before have I seen or even herd of anything remotely like this. The same problem remained after several reboots, and I know my hardware is good, so I decided to get out while I still could. I copied my home folder to an external drive and am in the process of reinstalling OpenSUSE 11.2 from scratch so there's no rush here, but has anybody seen or herd of this before? Is this some new 'holy crap the world's coming to end' BSOD?

It sounds like you managed to run cacafire (http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca) or some other variation of it. Without knowing exactly what you typed at the command-line, it's hard to tell exactly.