installed ubuntu 12.10 alpha 2. so far, so good. seems like everything works out of the box including hw acceleration for playing videos full screen with mplayer. booting results in a blank screen, but booting into the recovery and resuming the boot appears to get everything back on track. will look into this more shortly. running an update past alpha 2 gets rid of the blank screen durring boot, but unity forces everything through compiz which makes the box painfully slow. of course this may change sine we are still dealing with alpha software. right now staying on alpha 2 since it offers decent performance as well as the ability to watch my videos.

Thank you for your detailed feedback.

Installed ubuntu 12.10 alpha3 and booted without problems. But the unity desktop was pratically useless, long response time and almost impossible to use the keyboard.
Installing the LXDE desktop made it usable, but personally I find it too light. Next the XFCE desktop was installed and a few tests done.
The display now works in 1920x1080 32 bit, well done!
Glxgears showed around 100.
Xubuntu alpha3 was finally installed and had the boot problems as JesseB describes. Installing the more than 300 MB update fixed the booting problems and resulted in a better XFCE desktop layout.
I noticed that under LXDE the memory usage was much lower that XFCE. No swap in use with a few tabs open in Firefox, but under XFCE swap is in use under the same circumstances.