Hi guys. Decided to try K 8.10. Well, downloaded iso, burned it, rebooted. And what we see? A naked shell with (initramfs) and "help". What next? Maybe some options are needed for kernel to boot? Please give any ideas you have. Thanks.

I'm can't advise about any boot options. But I would suggest you first check the md5sums to verify the files on your CD. I just checked an old Ubuntu CD I have and the option (presented when live CD boots) is called Check CD for Defects.

What were the last few lines written to screen before you were dumped into the shell?

There's a very good chance that all you have to do is boot with a correct parameter for "root=".

If you can mount your root partition(s) and post the contents of /etc/fstab and 'fdisk -l' we'll have a better idea of what you can do.

There are no any "last few lines". All I get is BusyBox,(btw, what is the BusyBox?) and (initramfs).
Btw, on another machine the dvd I've burned is able to boot into Live mode with KDE4.

Can you post the output of:

fdisk -l

and also the value of the "root=" parameter in the bootloader configuration. With grub you can press a key to select what you want to boot and to display the boot parameters. I can't remember if you have to press 'e' (edit) to see the boot parameters.

'busybox' is a program which can do the job of many system programs (ls, cd, mount, cat, more, vi ...)

The 'initramfs' is a compressed 'cpio' (that's the name of the tool) archive of a basic root filesystem which can be used to get the system up and running. Once the scripts in the 'initramfs' image have done their job (which includes finding the right drivers to be able to access your essential hardware such as the disks), the final root filesystem (which has *all* your software and so on) is mounted and the real 'init' program is run - at that point all the appropriate system startup scripts in /etc/init.d are run.

For a few years now, if the boot process got far enough to run the scripts in the initramfs image but could not load the final root filesystem, the Debian start scripts dumped you into the initramfs filesystem with busybox as your main tool. Often (but not always) you can fix up the system with those limited tools available.

Ok, tried noapic and nolapic options for boot. Installed Kubuntu then. Didn't like KDE4, too buggy and slow.

Installed now ubuntu 8.10. All is fine except fglrx driver. I'm getting black screen after installation? What the cure is?