I have had the same problem with my laptop, For many distros, I had to use the
boot command variations of removing the splash, and adding acpi=off and vga=ask
and set it to 4=0F05 as well as sometimes noapic and nolapic for PCLinuxOS,
Puppy, puppy lighthouse mariner, Mandriva, dream linux, tinyme linux, Damn small
linux, Mepis, crunchbang, however Ubuntu I could never get to work, I have
throroughly searched the internet for this and no-one else mentioned getting a
modern Ubuntu one to work on my laptop at least. I ended up using Mepis Anti-X
and using the acpi=off vga=ask choosing 4 and when it booted up it all worked
fine. I then had issues with wifi network using wicd, rutil and wpa_supplicant
gui, go to the Antix-CC control centre found in Applications>Other>Anti-xCC and
use the top left icon with the two pcs icon. This worked first time and very
quickly for me. I pent a huge amount of time over two weeks looking for a linux
distro and trying to find solutions to the meriad of problems the above
operating systems had, but mepis Anti-X is fast and worked first time! However,
i am currently havving isues adding pathway to synaptic, it says the servers
dont exist, or I might be doing it incorrectly.