'but nothing' is too uninformative. You will need to elaborate on that - error message? no GUI? what is the problem?
From personal expereince, I can say that every distro is differently able to handle hardware issues. Usually if the distro you are using is having issues in dealing with the hardware, try another distro. And Ubuntu is NOT the most apt noob distro., inspite of its popularity I recommend PCLinux, Mandriva and Opensuse in that order.
The most common issue would be no GUI, in which case the issue is that the proper gfx drivers are not available in the distro. You can try a different distro to see if it can handle the gfx better. Being a relative noob myself, I can tell you that changing the driver to 'vesa' helps, but I am not sure how to do it Ubuntu. (every distro differs in basic commands as well).
I have also faced a problem of almost every distro crashing (belenix based on Opensolaris was the only one that would successfully boot), which was rectified by adding 'all generic ide' to the boot command.