When installing UBUNTU Server on an old PC i encountered display problems. The machine would run the server bit nothing showed up on the display. As the display card was an old VGA thing I had to modify the GRUB config.
I found this bug report after a lengthy Google search – basically the GRUB boot loader was using a resolution my graphics card couldn’t handle (something ridiculous like 640 x 480).
All I had to do was edit a grub config file, like so:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
And change a line that says:
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480
to
GRUB_GFXMODE=800x600 or whatever your card can handle.
Notice I also removed the hash so it is no longer a comment.
Once this was done, I told grub to rebuild it’s runtime configuration files form the config file I had provided, like so:
update-grub
After that command completed, I restarted, and now the console is working normally.