Upgrade to 10.04 hangs after login

[Relysis]

I just upgraded from Karmic, and the upgrading seemed to go smoothly. Upon restart the login screen comes up as normal and accepts my user name/pw. Then it fades to a strange white cloud dream looking thing and hangs. I don't see a cursor or my desktop. I can get to console from there, but I don't know how to fix it. I have an old dell laptop that ran Karmic perfectly. It has an ATI X300 graphics card, but I was using the open driver.

Any suggestions?

[Relysis]

I've been working on this all afternoon, and could really use some help. I've tried everything I've found on the forums, and nothing works. Even a small suggestion would help.

[Relysis]

Final pre-windows 7 bump. Just got an iphone, so I either need Windows or Lucid for syncing. I was really hoping for the latter.

[Relysis]

I never found a solution to this, so I did a clean install. It booted up this time in my maximum resolution (1920x1200). Everything was working fine, so I went to change the resolution to 1680x1050, which is the resolution I was using before the upgrade. Immediately, the same thing happened. The screen faded to a white-ish cloud shape. Both resolutions are 16:10. I can't explain this. I'm not using any proprietary driver. I guess the moral of the story is to stay away from 1680x1050, but I'd like to know why, and if I should file a bug report.

EDIT: All the other 16:10 resolutions cause this to happen, other than the 1920x1200 that Ubuntu defaults to. I haven't tried the others, since this is a widescreen monitor. This resolution is way too high for me, even with enlarged fonts, etc.

[dioxholster]

maybe its because of the graphic card? like doesnt that need drivers? and i think its best to use maximum resolution.

[Relysis]

I'm sure it's the graphics card. It's legacy from Ati, but the open driver was working fine in 9.10. While everything is sharper at higher resolutions, I can't read anything at 1920x1200 on a 15" screen.

Anybody else using the X300 with 10.04?

[dino99]

remove xorg.conf:

sudo rm -f /etc/X11/xorg.conf

add this ppa to synaptic repo:

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates

update, upgrade, then check driver activation:

system -> admin -> hardware driver

*** ATI dropped fglrx driver support for that chipset over a year ago. ****

[Relysis]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, the X300 is no longer supported like you said, so there is no proprietary driver to be used. I removed xorg.conf and added that repository. It installed several new updates, so I tried to change the resolution again. Unfortunately, the same thing happened and I had to boot into safe mode.

Thanks for the repo though. If there's any chance of a fix coming down the line through that, I'll keep it updated.

EDIT: Now I can only boot into Ubuntu through safe graphics mode. Is there any way to change the root graphics configuration while in this mode? I changed it to the working resolution in this mode and rebooted, but the regular login still hangs. Of course when I tried to change the configuration file when loading safe mode, it wouldn't let me select it.