I bought a used Compaq armada m700 laptop Pentium 2 with no operating system, when I try to load Ubuntu program it starts to load but then goes to a black screen and the computer doesn't respond. the computer originally had the windows 98 install. any ideas?

have you formatted the drive to remove all the data that was on the drive before?

Hi,
I had the same problem, but i overcame it by downloading Freespire, Freespire is originally derived from Linspire, a commercial operating system based on Ubuntu, and now forms the base from which new releases of Linspire are derived.
To download Freespire please goto: http://www.freespire.org/
Screenshot:

You may also want to try PCLinuxOS_2007

BUT I would first do as Brain_Damage suggested "reformat your drive"

PCLOS comes as a live CD, so you can try running from the CD first, if all goes well, try to install.

also if your current format is FAT32 you could try to format to the ext2 (Linux native) filesystem as some compatibility issues have been reported to Ubuntu with FAT32
Thanks,
Seywar

bd123, you failed to mention processor speed, amount of memory and which version of Ubuntu.

The latest distro, Ubuntu v.7.10 or Gutsy Gibbon, has recommended minimum system requirements: 500MHz processor, 192MB RAM (320MB to install from Desktop CD), 4GB HDD (8GB recommended), graphic card capable of 1024x768 resolution. If your system does not meet this requirement, you will have problems.

You can install the Xubuntu variation, which uses Xfce for the GUI instead of Gnome and which can operate with as little as 64MB RAM (96MB recommended)

Hope this helps.