Hi folks,
I have home built system with 3 IDE drives and 1SATAdrive, 1 SATA DVD and an external USB DVD writer on an athlon x2 3800, 2 Gb memory. ATI radeon 550 with 512 MB memory as the graphics card. with win XP, winVista and UBuntu 8.04 running. UBUNTU was on a full 40 GB ide drive. yesterday I updated (clean install from the downloaded CD)to 9.04. Everything was fine. Last night I updated all the packages along with security packs etc. after that UBUNTU boots in command prompt normally but when I start X I get only balck and white bands and no desktop. I really dont know the syntacts etc for Linux. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
thanks a lot
jebaxr1

Now i realise may be the ATI radeon drivers is the problem. Can I uninstall the ATI driver that i installed through the package updater
thanks in advance
jebaxr1

Isn't there a restricted drivers icon in the top panel? If so, click on that, then disable the ATI driver.

thanks Brian,
but I cannot even get in to my desktop. only on command prompt.
thanks,
jebaxr1

well- don't know how much I have to offer... but when you get to the command prompt type-

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

change the line that says

driver (it'll probably have in quote "ati" written next to it..) change it so it says...

driver "vesa"

then click ctrl O to save & ctrl X to exit the program.. type startx

vesa is the name of the generic graphics driver.. so it'll at least get you back to xscreen.