Hi All,

I've recently bought a low-end Windows 8 laptop for the purposes of turning it into my linux coding machine. For this reason I went with a kabini (quad core 1.5Ghz)

I've disabled secure boot in the BIOS. Currently I've resized win8 to allow 30Gb for testing linux distros. I'm still using UEFI boot. Here's the result for live usb keys for various distros

Fedora & KDE spin both freeze on load.

Mint Cinnamon and KDE crash when loading xorg. I've regenerated xorg.conf.new and copied to /etc/x11 which got me to a splash screen but no further.

I'm currently downloading Ubuntu 13, Mint KDE and OpenSuse. Does anyone have experience with this laptop and/or hardware and can recommend a working distro?

opensuse freezes at the globe of the kde startup symbols
ubuntu 13.10 has a completely blank screen
fedora also freezes.

Is this due to UEFI or the processor?

Linux Distro for Lenovo G505 (AMD A4-5000)

Porteus v3.0
64bit, GUI - MATE or XFCE
+ Development tools
+ VCD:Radeon + AMD Catalyst

Not a fedora fanbut fedora has uefi support.
Let me correct that statement haven't learned how to deal with rpm distro's.
Debian is also supposed to have uefi support.

For a Kabini CPU you will need a distro with fairly recent kernel and Mesa to get X started, unless you install the proprietary AMD drivers, then only a recent kernel is needed, Go for Arch, Gentoo or Ubuntu 14.04.

Adding the kernel parm nomodeset may help. Also, distributions like OpenSUSE have a fully functional text installer option. This way you can install and later install the proprietary graphics driver and become graphical after install.

OpenSUSE also has a remote VNC installer that allows you to install graphically using a remote VNC client.