Comment 20 for bug 312518

I did not have any flickering with Jaunty stable. It would be better upgrading the video drivers only since Karmic is pretty unstable now. Try the drivers from the ubuntu-x-swat ppa:

https://edge.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates

Anyway, if you want to upgrade to karmic you don't have to format. Just open a terminal and write:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d