Help with video problem

[dicer]

Okay, I tried Ubuntu and I think it took out the on board video.
I would like to know why the resolution and everything is so just right on the setup screens and then after a reboot it trashed? Why can't any of these distros just default everything to the setup screen stuff, and then you can go in a tweek it how you want.
I also tried Mandriva got to a point of a dark screen, then loaded an old 10.0 mandrake and after reboot, my moniter complained about the wrong resolution, there was no questions in set up about it. Then after a few minutes the screen went to sleep, pluged in a old crt and its dark too. So whats up?
Does anyone know the resolution and other settings for the setup screen and a way to always default any distro I get to those settings?
I'm so surprized that the linux community has not woke up to this one little simple detail. It is always the stupid easy simple things that give a person the most trouble.
Please help.

[dicer]

Well I lucked out the one PC is okay. I had loaded mandrake 10.0 in it, and when it boots up again dark screen. So did the live Ubuntu cd and the safe graphics mode, and actually saw some icons as it was doing its load thing. But now that its done,
the screen is full of hash, Vertical lines wide light and dark horizontal lines.
What is with it? This is a fairly old pc its an ATI VGA Mach64 video, I just want to know why it is supported just fine at the start up and shows a nice Ubuntu logo or the Mandrake start up or even the Mandriva start up but then it goes to crap?
Windows XP and NT worked just fine on the thing.

[Hal343]

I believe that the video card isn't supported by the newer distros. If they use the ATI proprietary driver, AMD dropped support for older graphics cards.[ driver mach64-20060403-linux.i386] may be the driver you need.} says that support has been dropped for Ubuntu since Dapper Drake(6.06)
Google ATI Mach 64 driver support for linux. go to bug report 34590 and there are instuctions.
It won't let me paste the URL in.
. .Open a terminal cd /etc/X11/xorg.conf . You'll need to know that to find xorg.conf

I hope that helps.