I recently bought the Dell Mini 12 (unfortunately the Vista version, ubuntu hadn't been offered yet) and have been trying to install various distros on it for quite a while but have had no success. Dell just started selling the Ubunutu version so the laptop should support it, but I can never get the installer to load X. I've been copying the image to a USB drive and booting from it. It loads, but when it goes to start X it stops and simply brings up the commmand prompt. Trying to start X the usual way ("startx") simply gives an error message along the lines of "Screen found, but none have usable configuration....Fatal server error: no screens found".

I know that this laptop has the somewhat unusual GMA 500 chipset, but if Dell is selling a Ubuntu version, there must be a way to make it work.

On a side note, I've also tried the Ubuntu Mobile version as I thought it might have better hardware support, but still no dice.