Ubuntu 9.10 Server boots to black screen (still works though)

Thanks.  I'll give it a try.  Looking through it, I'm not sure I understand all of what it is saying.  I was able to make some progress last night, I don't have to manually edit grub each time I boot, but I'm still not using the proper driver.  I'm pretty experienced with Windoze, but not so much with Linux.  It's so frustrating.  It seems like everytime I try to do something, I get, "Access denied", "You don't have permission to do that", "Read-only filesystem", "You're not the owner", "Just give up and go back to Windows".  I can find helpful suggestions online, but when I try to follow them, many times they are for a different distro or there's some 'rights' issue I need to resolve first.  I spent several hours last night trying to figure out how to make a permanent change to the grub.cfg file (other distros call it grub.conf or maybe menu.lst).  That lead to an impromptu indoctrination of chmod so that I could modify /etc/default/grub (I think) before running sudo update-grub.  In the end I was victorious, but it took alot of time and I was getting very frustrated.  Short of seeking therapy, are there any suggested materials/sites that I should become familiar with?  I know there are alot of them out there, but I don't want to waste my time with just some 'so-so' materials.

Followed the KernelModeSetting instructions.  Adding the kernel parameter 'i915.modeset=1' at boot time, with 'quiet splash' parameters included seemed to work.  When I say 'work', I mean it booted to the GUI.  I still cannot enable the nifty Visual Effects.  I took it a step further and went to https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/drivers-only and followed the instructions for adding their PPA.  Amazingly, for me, that worked without any problems.  Update Manager saw all of the new video drivers out there at xorg-edgers.  I deselected all of the other hardware manufacturers except the Intel one.  Did the install.  Rebooted.  Added the i915.modeset=1 parameter to grub again (I haven't made it permanent yet).  Still boots to GUI but still no Visual Effects.  I noticed during boot, when text is flying by on the screen, there was something that says:
render error detected, EIR: 0x00000010
[drm:i915_handle_error] *ERROR* EIR Stuck: 0x00000010, masking
render error detected, EIR: 0x00000010
[drm] DAC-5: set mode 1280x1024 a
I saw this before I 'installed' the updated Intel driver.  It still appears.  How can I tell what drivers are loaded?  How can I tell if the new Intel driver loaded?  I know it sounds like a trivial thing that I can't get Visual Effects to work, but these are the kinds of problems that help me to get a better understanding of how it all works and how to get around.  I know it used to work on version 8.04, I'd like to see it work again.  Thanks for your help.