If it's Backtrack4 (bt4-final.iso), try the "safe graphics" option fourth down in the boot menu. When you run startx after that, it'll use the generic Vesa driver rather than trying to detect your graphics card. This is like using the Windows generic video driver and has the best chance of working.

Backtrack is a pretty heavy distribution to use as a introduction. It's a specialty distribution primarily for security and forensics uses. While it will provide some general purpose software, much of what it includes is going to take some learning with half or more being text environment based. It's meant for those who consider GUI optional.

My guess is that your onboard video is not well supported. Without support from the hardware vendor, Xorg and kernel developers are limited to reverse engineering hardware support for as much as they can which means more main stream hardware. My X201's onboard video has the same issue; runs like a dream with the generic Vesa driver but the driver but support under xserver-xorg-video-intel needs to be updated to include it.

The biggest problem your likely to have is liveCD detecting your video card but not properly supporting it. They are mostly automated so you don't really get a chance to specify Vesa during boot (like Backtrack's safe graphics option). In my case, I went with a Debian 6 Squeeze full install where I could choose to only install the Vesa driver; not an install process I'd recommend as an introduction either but it's an option. If you where going to make a long term go of it, you may consider buying a video card to add into the machine so you can disable the onboard GPU. You should be able to find something that is known to work well with Linux based platforms for under a hundred.

In the end, you can thank hardware vendors for delivering drivers or minimal information to produce drivers to only one OS. For me, it's lead to voting with my wallet and only buying hardware from vendors who's hardware is well supported across multiple OS. I personally consider hardware that only works well under one OS to be a factory defect or design flaw rather than some kind of benefit for the end user.

Lime and Limewire are two different things; the first being a distribution and the second being a P2P application.