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You'll need to start Linux in single-user mode. GRUB, the bootloader used by Ubuntu, makes this fairly easy.
Once your bios has finished its initialization, you'll either get a GRUB menu, or a prompt to press some key to get into said menu. Either way, this will only last for a few seconds unless you press a key. Once in the menu, select the second option, whose name should contain "Recovery Mode". This will boot linux in single-user mode.
If you've set a root password, you'll be prompted for it now. After this, you'll find yourself in a text-only root shell, free to issue whatever commands you need to.
By the way, when presented with options for a graphics driver, you'll have two options that would make sense for your mobo: "via", for the driver which will fully support your S3 chip, or "vesa", for the generic svga driver.
The installer was probably using vesa, which is pretty much guaranteed to work well with any modern PC. You'll have no graphics acceleration with it, however. The via driver supports acceleration, but may be harder to get working properly. I'm guessing that the installer detected your S3 chip and configured your installation to use the via driver, which is glitching up.
IIRC, there is an alternate driver that better supports Unichrome chips. Try the vesa driver and stock via driver. If vesa doesn't give acceptable performance and via doesn't work, we can try to get the other driver installed.
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