I've been trying to install Ubuntu and/or it's derivatives on my new Dell Vostro 3550 but I'm finding it impossible to boot into the live CD environment. Here are the things I've already tried:

• Booting from multiple versions of multiple distributions (Ubuntu 10.10, Ubuntu 11.04, Mint 11, Mint 10)
• Booting from a Live USB created with unetbootin, the Linux Mint startup disk creator, the universal USB creator and dd of=linuxmint.***.iso if if=/dev/sdx.
• Burning a CD and booting from the internal CD drive.

In the case of the USB keys with the latest versions of Ubuntu it gets to the page where I can select a boot option, but after selecting an option the screen goes black, even the back light turns off. With the older distributions the screen stays on but it starts loading and then just hangs.

The CDs don't even try to boot. It starts spinning but then falls back to the default Windows install.

The only way I've got it to work so far is with Wubi, but that's hardly ideal. I'd like to have two separate physical partitions with a /home and /.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.