I installed UbuntuStudio on my Dell Inspiron 9400 with an ATI Readon x1400 video card. After the install( which went smoothly)I rebooted the system. When xserver tried to start it fails. i mortified the xorg.conf file. I changed the device to vesa and restarted and it still did not start. i know that ATI is notorious for bad or no drivers. has anyone installed ubuntu on a inspiron 9400? just as a side note. i did install OpenSuse 10.2 and xserver did start. i tried to install the drivers but could not get desktop effects to work. again bad driver.

Thanks.

I had the same situation when installed Fedora 7 onto my Dell Inspiron 1501. Precompiled ATI drivers (fglrx) didn't work and X server didn't started. But Ubuntu 7.04 coped with my video card and worked (after restricted ATI drivers installation).

First of all find section "Device" in your xorg.conf and replace "Driver" to "radeon". In my case it looked so:

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies Inc RS485 [Radeon Xpress 1100 IGP]"
Driver "radeon"
Busid "PCI:1:5:0"
EndSection

And restart X. It should load native Ubuntu's ATI drivers.

Then go to http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html and download latest ATI driver installer. It should help.

Good luck!