Stupid penguin strikes back: Ubuntu does not boot after installing proprietary ATI video driver

Well, in my opinion Linux will never be a user-friendly operating system suitable for home usage. There are a lot issues but there is one particular problem I hate at most: drivers for new hardware. You can only be safe when installing Linux on at least 1 year old computer. But if you have a brand new laptop, get ready.

There will be blood.

Ok, maybe I'm a bit angry, but I just lost 2 hours by fixing some stupid stuff.

Recently I got a new laptop. There was a bunch of problems after installing Ubuntu 12.04 along with Windows 8 (btw, the installation itself was a bit of a quest): overheating, reduced battery time, system suspension failures. What else? Ah, yes, after installing native ATI video drivers the system did not boot. There were no error message, it just hanged.

Here's how I fixed it. Maybe it will be of help to other "hackers" out there.

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The goal of the rescue operation is to remove the new driver and restore the default video-driver.

First, load in the recovery mode.
Select item "root" console. Btw, you can try loading in fail safe mode, but in my case it did not work.
Remount the file system in read/write mode:

mount -o remount,rw /

Then remove the video-driver:

apt-get purge fglrx*

Remove X11 configuration file:

mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.broken

Reboot and pray that it worked ;)

Help was found here and here.

Dismissed!