purple screen Ubuntu

[aintnothang]

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 today and everything went smooth. I installed the radeon driver for my lappy from ubuntu, not ati. I went to start up ubuntu and I got a purple screen, I heard the welcome jingle, but there is no mouse keyboard...nothing. =( How do I restore Ubuntu to its former self?

[Oneslowz28]

fresh install from a live disc?

[aintnothang]

fresh install from a live disc?
Yes!

[Luke122]

10.04 is pretty slick.. running it at home now on my main PC. :)

[x88x]

fresh install from a live disc?

Since you (I'm guessing) haven't really done much to the install yet other than the driver install, I would do this. It only takes ~15 minutes usually, and it'll be cleaner than trying to fix whatever went wrong. This time I would go with the latest driver from ATI. Theoretically, the Ubuntu one should work (I mean, that's kinda the point of having one in the Ubuntu repositories, even if it is old), but sometimes there can be issues. What chip is your GPU? If it's new, the Ubuntu-approved driver might be too old to support it.

[aintnothang]

Its a 4570 in my laptop.

[x88x]

Hmm, that shouldn't be too new...have you tried reinstalling and using AMD's latest driver?

[Luke122]

have you tried connecting an external monitor? Maybe it's goofed up the default display output.

[aintnothang]

Hmm, that shouldn't be too new...have you tried reinstalling and using AMD's latest driver?
no. So reinstalling linux itself?

[x88x]

Well, I figure if you haven't really done anything, that'd be the cleanest option, and it doesn't take very long (~10-15 minutes on the last install I did).

[aintnothang]

So I just run the live disc again and make it install to the same partition?

[x88x]

Yeah, make sure you tell it to use the entire disc, not resize and use empty space (that would leave you with two side-by-side installs, one the new one, one the current, messed up one).