It could be a video recognition problem, I would try loading debian xfce
version myself. Go to www.debian.org and your closest mirror, you will find
the iso near the bottom of the cd iso list. There is no reason that once you
have installed debian that you can't change to xubuntu by changing the
repositories. It might help to try and figure out what the video card is on
your laptop, then look up some drivers for it, if that is the problem. If the
worst comes to the worst try installing from a net install cd of debian and
choose your desktop version from there.