"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."