I have been running Ubuntu for a couple years on my Dell Inspiron 9300
laptop but it does not like the latest 8.10 Ubuntu release! I did an
upgrade from 8.04 first and then did a fresh install of 8.10.

In the both the upgrade and fresh install, I find that the video drivers
are locking up the computer. Both the open source Radeon driver and the
proprietary fglrx drivers cause the lock-up or Linux kernel freeze. The
Radeon driver locks up without doing anything in particular; just locks.
The flgrx locks up when playing a video file; I get pretty blinking
vertical lines without access to the console via ALT-Fx.

Installed Fedora 10 and the open source Radeon driver does not lock-up and
there is a patched version of the fglrx driver in the Fedora testing-update
repository. Laptop working fine now with Fedora 10.