I have an old Compaq Pro desktop with Ubuntu 8.04 installed. I have been using it without a major problem until four days ago. When I attempted to boot all I got was a screen with green vertical lines at the top and horizontal yellow, red, and orange lines below that. Since I recently had downloaded a new kernal I tried to use another kernal but that got the same result. I tried to boot with a live cd and finally got it to boot in low graphics mode. I have also tried to boot into the safe mode and tried the recovery option. I got the following warning:
xserver-xorg postinst warning: overwriteing possibly customized configuration file; backup in /etc/X11/xorg.conf .20100323151611
I have no idea what that means or what I should do. Can anyone point me in the right direction? I would really hate to wait the 30 some odd days for 10.04 to come out.

You could make a backup of your old xorg.conf file just in case. It is telling you that the config file will be overwritten. Simply copy xorg.conf to xorg.conf.old. You could also add the date to the name so you know later when this backup was from.

You didn't indicate the type of card you are using. In the event that a file was corrupted, you might try reinstalling the driver for it as well. The kernel driver portion would need to be replaced anyway to match the new kernel.

Thanks, how do I do that? I am a relatively new guy and not to familiar with the command line.

Sorry, the card is a 86c968 (Vision 968 VRAM) That is unless I read the wrong line.

If you are running in X, open a terminal program such as xterm, konsole or gnome-terminal. You can also log into a virtual terminal (Press CTRL-ALT-F2 or another function key to reach it and log in.)
You could post the output of "lspci -v". It may help identify your graphic device.

OK, what I did here was remove the external video card and booted from a live cd. Everything seemed to work so I shut it down and removed the live cd from the tray and rebooted. Bingo!! I have Wireless Internet, access to email, and so far all of the installed programs that I have tried seem to work flawlessly. My fingers are crossed. The problem was the external video card which apparently went bad. I got this machine from a friend who had originally set it up for playing games, hence the extra external video card I guess. I will mark this thread as solved.