Opps, should not have removed that driver....

..or if I could do a reinstall over the top of the old version, without wiping the system out, that would be great. Played with drivers because video was running terribly slow, any game would run at 1 frame per minute. Video is an ATi Radeon X1950. Plenty fast enough.

Sure its just a video driver, thats all. You don't have to wipe the system out whatsoever.

If you use the hardware driver in system -> administration then it should be offered to you. You may need to formulate an xorg.conf file to specify the settings but the ati site says they still support the chip with their proprietary software.

Hi Actionparsnip. Thank you for responding.
Problem is, I can't get to the destop in Ubuntu.
Is there some way of booting to the console to make these changes?

boot to recovery root console, remove the radeon and ati drivers and you will force the system to use vesa driver. You can then get a desktop

if you run:

sudo apt-get --purge remove xserver-xorg-video-radeon xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-mach64 xserver-xorg-video-r128 xserver-xorg-video-radeon

It will make the OS use vesa, you can then get a desktop and install the driver. If you need any of the packages, you can reinstall them in the desktop.

Ok, I can open another console window. Woot. One last question. Which drivers do I use for the ATi Radeon x1950?
Again, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Aslo, it still has same black background, with verticle dialog. saying can't load saying....

(EE) Failed load module "ati" (module does not exist, 0)
(EE) VESA: Kernal modesetting driver in use, refused to load
(EE) FBDEV(0): FBIOPUTCMAP: Invalid argument
...
...
...
...
...
Thank you for you help. I am hoping you have sudo ap-get command to install video driver?

Found this... https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/FglrxInteferesWithRadeonDriver
Thank you for all your help. =)

Problem: Need to fully remove -fglrx and reinstall -ati from scratch

Here is a more aggressive recipe which removes both -fglrx and -ati, and reinstalls the latter:

  sudo /usr/share/ati/fglrx-uninstall.sh # (if it exists)
  sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx*
  sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg-video-ati xserver-xorg-video-radeon
  sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-ati
  sudo apt-get install --reinstall libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dri xserver-xorg-core
  sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Optionally, if you want the proprietary fglrx/Catalyst driver to be installable through the Restricted Hardware Driver Manager (a.k.a. jockey), you'll need to:

  sudo apt-get install fglrx-modaliases

Then reboot (or fix up the kernel modules and restart gdm).

Thanks actionparsnip, that solved my question.