I am trying to install Ubuntu 14.04 on a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro laptop(it's quite old yes, has about 30GB Hard Drive and I think 192mb of RAM) which currently has Windows XP installed (which I'd like to keep for the time being).

I have downloaded the 32-bit Desktop ISO and used unetbootin to create a Live USB for this laptop.

When I boot from USB, I arrive at the unetbootin Grey and Blue menu and pick either "Try Ubuntu without installing", or "Install Ubuntu".

The menu goes away and an Ubuntu loadscreen showing UBUNTU and four dots which progressively change between white and orange.

At about the second color changing cycle a white underscore symbol appears next to the fourth dot and flickers. There is some leftover text from the kernel boot still visible, but there is no graphical desktop.

After this I have to hard reboot or shut-down.

$ lshw -c video
*-display UNCLAIMED
description: VGA compatible controller 
product: CN700/P4M800 Pro/P4M800 CE/VN800 Graphics [S3 UniChrome Pro] 
Vendor: VIA Technologies, Inc. 
physical id: 0 
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 
version: 01 
width: 32 bits 
clock: 66MHz 
capabilities: pm agp agp-2.0 vga_controller bus_master cap_list 
configuration: latency=64 mingnt=2 
resources: memory:f0000000-f3ffffff memory:d1000000-d1ffffff