It all started as an ordinary Wednesday morning, I booted my Jaunty Jackalope box and once past the grub menu, all I got was a corrupted display on my ATI Radeon 1600. I know it’s a working video card, (liveCDs work just fine) so I tried using recovery mode but whenever I started the xserver, I’d get the same corrupted video and I couldn’t switch terminals, keyboard input was ignored. My initial reaction was that I had to reconfigure xserver-xorg (#dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg) but it made absolutely no difference.
I hunted around Google and found various Ubuntu forums and bug reports about the ATI proprietary fglrx driver but none of the suggested solutions worked for me. (This thread has a number of useful suggestions for others encountering this issue.) For me, I could not “sudo apt-get autoremove xorg-driver-fglr” because I got an error that the package wasn’t installed and “sudo aticonfig –initial” gave an error saying that it couldn’t find any supported hardware.
My solution in the end was to run the following from the recovery root shell (with network support):
#apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx
I then rebooted and used the graphics fix option in the recovery menu and then booted normally et voila! Hope that helps someone out there on teh intrawebs.
