Attempting to install/try ubuntu 11.10 on my new laptop, using a liveCD (and tried USB). I get the purple screen (with the man/keyboard at the bottom) and after that the screen flashes bright white before going black. Ubuntu continues to load in the background, with login sound etc but the screen is off.

I have tried as many different solutions as I could find including:

• using nomodestep, xforcevesa, i915.modeset=0 in boot options (seperately): varying consequences, but either I end up at a blinking cursor with no prompt, a command line (startx fails: no screen found), or the original blank screen again

• Tried booting from VirtualBox - it crashes at the same place the screen would go blank when using a CD/USB

• tried 11.04: I don't have this problem BUT when trying to install, I get a ubi-partman error 141 (possibly down to the three partitions that came on my laptop... not sure why HP needed there own separate partition for HP Tools...)

Model: HP Pavillion DV6 6B08SA
Processor: AMD Quad-Core A6-3410MX APU with Radeon HD 6545G2 Dual Graphics (1.6 GHZ 4 MB L2 cache )
Chipset: AMD RS880M

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I just want to be able to partition the drive and install Ubuntu. I'm assuming the issue is graphics card related, although I have no confirmation of that. I have caught a glimpse of some output to do with pulseaudio and [fail], but I can't imagine why that would cause a screen problem and the sound definitely works anyway.