I have an old dell latitude d610 that I've just installed ubuntu 12.10 onto, and now unfortunately it will not complete booting up. The screen flashes purple but then fades out and dies. I'm fairly sure there is an issue with graphics drivers, as I had to turn on "nomodeset" in the options when installing off a DVD to see the installer, but I'm very new to linux and don't know terribly much at all apart from what I've read on the net.

I have been able to hold down shift and bring up GRUB, and entered into recovery mode, and when I enter into the low graphics mode, the xserver log file says it can detect a screen but found none with a useable configuration, then goes on to say a fatal server error has occurred and no screen have been found at all, telling me to check a log file at "/var/log/xorg.0.log"

I have no idea how to check this specific log file!

Attempting to actually go further than this in low graphics mode and restart the display simply artefacts the screen.

It is all very strange and annoying because I did once by random have the machine boot completely for no apparent reason, but upon restarting the issue reoccurred.