Synecdoche

I had screwed up my system(Ubuntu box) by multiple installation of the ATI drivers. I installed the proprierty ATI drivers from the driver file downloaded from their site named ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run. Then I reinstalled it again by Envy and also by the Hardware drivers section. Result - no display on login. Not even booting into recovery console and fixing X-server worked. The bottomline is never screw with your video drivers. I had to manually remove the fglrx drivers to get back display. 1. Booted into recovery console and fell into root shell. 2. apt-get remove xorg-driver-fglrx 3. But I read in some forum that "....where proprietary drivers are concerned is that Ubuntu/Debian has a conflict resolution system to redirect certain libraries that conflict called dpkg-divert, since binary drivers like ATI and Nvidia especially have a bad habit or creating incompatible libGL.so binaries that blow the system away if they aren't accomodated and removed properly l...

-------------- DRAFT ----------------- This is a problem with proprietary ATI drivers ('fglrx') in linux. For most cases open source drivers work great. But for some machines, especially with the combination of AMD64 and onboard ATI VGA card, the GDM fails to load. Take for example, the latest version of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. It fails to load Gnome for above mentioned configuration. The only way out it seems that is to log into failsafe gnome and install the proprietary 'fglrx' driver. But this drivers comes with it's own set of problems. These include, flicker of gnome-screensaver, improper display in video, mplayer not playing video etc. The flicker in gnome-screensaver is remedied by installing xscreensaver. Why xscreensaver works but gnome-screensaver doesn't is to be discussed in a separate thread. It seems that the proprietary 'fglrx' driver is using some non-default screen ....