[ale] Upgrading to 9.10 hosed my system :-(

[JK]

I just upgraded my excellent 9.04 Ubuntu box to 9.10, and now all has
turned to sh*t.  X won't start, the screen flickers madly even in
text mode, and the keyboard doesn't work right - it only sees approximately
every fifth key I type. This is just a disaster :-((( (imagine the little
overhead bar meaning "last '(' repeated infinitely").

Any advice?  I can at least log in via ssh, so I can copy /home off
somewhere else and do a fresh install of 9.04.  Seems like there should
be an easier way.  (I am generally clueless about modern package
management, all I know how to do with apt is "install some_package".
It is a sad state of affairs for a person who first built a 0.90
kernel off floppies in 1992.)

Very very sad :-(

-- JK

PS - WAAAH!