Which version of Ubuntu are you running? That guide is made for Ubuntu 8.10 (after an upgrade, I believe), so you might try running that or if that doesn’t work first install an older versoin (8.04) and then upgrade to 8.10 to replicate the environment of the author of that article. Also, that article doesn’t seem to be about running it in a VM so that might add additional problems (I can imagine you’d need to use other drivers or something for that).
Also, you might try an older version in general because I believe some really old drivers were removed from the latest version. Or perhaps a newer (as yet unreleased) version.
Oh I see you’re running 8.10, disregard my comments on that ;-)
You might also want to check out getting help over IRC, live feedback often works very well (it’s a bit like a helpdesk).