You don't mention what kind of graphics card in your laptop. Intel chipsets and
Nvidia are quite well supported and ATI is coming onside and new drivers should
be available soon. When you run the Live Cd you can change the boot parameters,
including graphics resolution. You should be able to boot into one of these, as
even low res is supported. Look to the bottom of the grub boot screen. Press F4.
Change the resolution and see if it helps.

Also try this: At the bottom you can see a box beginning with the words boot
options with text written in it afterwards. It will change as you cursor through
the menu. Look at the end of the line and remove the word quiet. This will allow
you to watch the boot process and see if it stalls and what is causing the
problem.

See: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootParameters

As to why 6.10 worked and 8.04 didn't, has to do with the amount of data that
will fit on a disk. Support for older hardware gives way to support for the
newer, in the same way that Windows 95 drivers won't work in XP or XP drivers in
Vista. The drivers are specific to the kernel. Ubuntu 6.10 would not upgrade
because it is past its support period. It expired last April. See:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Good luck. Let us know how you do and please provide as much info as you can
when requesting help. In this case you need to tell us the graphics card since
it is a graphics problem that you mention.

Thanks for the advice. The laptop has an integrated Intel graphics
chipset, so there is no graphics card.

When its an integrated graphics card it the mother board drivers that
are required. You need to seek the motherboard version and get those
drivers.

Do you know what Intel graphics chipset? It is important to match the on board
graphics with the proper driver.

Have you tried using the F4 key in grub to get it booting at a different
resolution? You can also try typing xdrvr=vesa in the line at the bottom of
which I wrote previously. Also remove the word quiet from that line to get a
text line by line view of the boot process

I don't know if this input will help at all, but maybe if you look at
the drivers for the chipset and video driver for Windows you will garner
some pertinent information at
support.gateway.com/.../1009037nv.shtml If you
click on Downloads, the page lists a Video driver near the end. My
understanding of laptop video drivers is that even though the "Video
Card" is only a chip on the motherboard, it is still treated separately
and needs the drivers installed just as if it were a plug-in card.

With all the older drivers being dropped, is it possible to get from the
repositories the old system settings program that let us select the monitor
and/or video card driver that use to be supported? Or at the least, let us use
generic/general drivers that lets us set the resolution and other settings on
our own. I've had 2 out of 4 installs run into this problem where I've been
stuck in 800x600. I was able to solve one and I'm still working on the other.

It use to be much easier to fix this problem when the vid-card or monitor were
not properly detected; we could go to the system settings program and select the
right ones. Now, we can't and we're forced to solve the problem on our own and
even play with the xorg.conf file.

It use to be much easier to fix this problem when the vid-card or
monitor were not properly detected; we could go to the system settings
program and select the right ones. Now, we can't and we're forced to
solve the problem on our own and even play with the xorg.conf file.

Reply: Yes, and we also used to have it so that if you messed up you were on
your own to fix it. Changing video drivers changed when xorg 7.3 came out and
Ubuntu adopted BulletProofX with Gutsy which basically tests the new driver and
gives you the option to go back before disaster strikes. If things do go wrong,
it will revert to vesa and you can try again instead of resorting to the
commandline.

We often forget that the good old days weren't always as good as we remember.

www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NjczNA

If I remember correctly it only works with GDM which might explain some
problems I had with Kubuntu and white screens when I triend to enable
compiz without the right driver.

My first experience with Linux was Kubuntu 6.10 so my 'Old Days' do not extend
beyond that. And I have yet to learn much linux command line commands. But, it
seems to me that the 15 seconds pre-change test is a wonderful feature adding to
the safety and usability of Linux but should not and does not exclude direct
access to the database of drivers but rather supports it. This would be utterly
irrelavent if the autodetect worked every time but it doesn't. And in my case,
I've found that the frequency of failure to be high enough that these two
options should have been given together, complimenting each other rather than
having the autodetect option at the exclusion of the driver select option.

Which brings me back to my original question. Is it still available, or
something like it, in the repos? I can understand if there is a space issue on
the Live CD but there is no reason it could not be available in the
repositories. I was pleasently suprised to see how well Ubuntu 8.10 worked on a
P3 laptop with 512mb of RAM. Only the video suffered, but the speed for
everything else was very acceptable. But it failed to autodetect/setup my screen
correctly and I was stuck in 800x600. In fact, the drivers had to have been
there because my fix only involved changes to the xorg.conf file using the
display info/setup from a Kubuntu7.10/xorg.conf file. Cut & pasted.

If we want Linux to apeal to the masses and encrease Linux user numbers, some
form of solution is needed which does not include terminal windows and command
line prompts because that is where the masses draw the line on acceptability.