I received a new Acer Aspire M1610 for Christmas.
925 Intel Pentium D
1GB RAM
SiS Mirage 3 Graphics SiS672 series
partitioned 160GB SATA hard disk

First, I tried Sabayon x86 1.1 Professional Edition. Everything was going fine until it stopped at 62% then gave me the command line. (At least, that's what I think it is. It says "sabayonx86 root#".)

Second, I tried Sbayon Linux x86 3.4f. It did about the same thing as above. Also, I tried a couple of cheat codes, but they didn't work.

Third, I tried Linux Mint 4.0, which works on my dad's old Acer. Unfortunately for me, Mint doesn't work as well on mine. It boots, but there is no bar on the bottom or icons on the side. In Safe Graphics Mode, though, everything seems to work.

Fourth, I tried Ubuntu 7.04. It gave me:
/bin/sh:can't access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)

Is there a common problem? Ideally, I'd like to have Sabayon with all the pretty graphics. If nothing else, I'll just get Mint in Safe Graphics Mode and see if I can get the graphics to work.

Hi and welcome to LQ. I've had problems getting live linux distros to work on one of my new laptops. The distros that worked out of the box for me were PCLinuxOS 2007 and openSUSE 10.3, so I suggest you try those.

Thank you. I'm torrenting them right now.

PCLinuxOS gives me the same error as Ubuntu. OpenSUSE worked, but it could not connect to the internet. It said something about not being able to detect the network card.
Would it be best to just wait until the next release of one of these distros and hope it works?

Its never guaranteed that future versions will work flawlessly, but they may do if they include a new kernel that plays along nicely with your hardware. If you can start a terminal emulator e.g. Konsole or gnome-terminal, enter the commands
This should show whether openSUSE recognises the network cards on your system.

It said:
00:04 Ethernet Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 191 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (rev02)

The exact thing it said about the network card earlier was "Unable to configure network card because kernel device not present."

Drivers for your card are available from sis.com/download/.