I've tried Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Debian, even though all have worked great for me I'm keeping with Ubuntu, I tested 12.04, 12.10 and even 13.04. The 12.04 LTS is the one I work with.
There's one issue persisting in the three distros I've tested, sometimes at random occasions the boot fails, after GRUB, it shows only a _
as prompt remaining indefinitely, I've let pass up to an hour, and best I could do was to wait for a while and try again until I get it to load.
Everytime this happens and I've selected recovery mode I get logs like these:
So, I blame the last line:
[ 0. .... ]Booting Node 0, Processors #1
to be the issue, all first log lines appear continuously but it'll stop then.
I already updated BIOS, but there's something I think it might be the issue and that's the Hyperthreading, I had disabled it after BIOS update and it stopped happening, now I enabled it for installing a 64 bits OS in VMWare Player and it happened again.
Last I tried: editing the /boot/grub/grub.conf by adding acpi=ht in the Ubuntu menu entry, not working. I googled and I've not really found a solution.