"I rebooted the machine and went through all the boot options I could on the live CD that had to do with video and nothing would solve the resolution problem. So while sitting at the desktop I decided to try the “Hardware Drivers” option under the administration menu and it managed to find the Nvidia video card driver and I installed that. Knowing this was a live CD and as soon as I reboot the computer I would lose everything I decided to use the Ctrl-ALT-Backspace option to reboot just the desktop and not the machine. I crossed my fingers and hoped that this would work and I would finally get a normal resolution so I could install Ubuntu 8.10. When the desktop came back after the reboot all was fixed in terms of the video resolution and I was able to do the install to hard disk.
"The reason this was such a problem having the 800 by 600 resolution was due to the install screens for the installer. Some of the Install screens have a lot of information on them and are quite long. If you have a resolution of 800 by 600 sometimes you won’t even see the OK or Cancel buttons on some of the dialog boxes and this is a problem when you’re trying to install something."
