I had Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) installed on this computer and it worked fine using the fglrx driver. I backed everything up and did a fresh/reformat install of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) without changing any hardware and it worked fine until I installed the fglrx driver and now it freezes on boot up right before it loads gdm. If I boot in single-user mode and run xfix then gdm loads but when I log in the screen becomes white and I only have a mouse pointer I can move around the screen. The only way I can get it to work is if I boot with single-user mode and log in with the Gnome failsafe mode.

I've tried the ATI hardware drivers that automatically install in Ubuntu, I've tried the drivers from ATI's website, I've followed various ATI driver install tutorials for Ubuntu, and I've also tried Envy.

Does anyone out there have any ideas?

Thanks in advance!

Well no matter what route you take in installing the drivers, it's the same (except that some ways might cause more garbage on the system, or make upgrading the drivers and/or kernel more difficult than others) so you could just as well stick to the Restricted Drivers Manager way, or maybe apt-get/Synaptic if you like.

You should be able to use X as a normal user by changing your graphics driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf from the fglrx driver to ati, a generic Ati driver that doesn't provide 3d hardware accelaration, but should work better. Then it's probably easier to find out what bugs. Check your logfiles too, under /var/log/ if here happens to be something about what dies with the fglrx driver loaded.