Unable to boot any distribution except Ubuntu (Mac)

[bobleeswagger90]

Hello all. I have a pretty interesting question I hope someone could help me out with. I have a mid-2010 Macbook Pro and I currently have Ubuntu dual booting with OSX 10.9. I've recently wanted to try other distributions, however, I cannot boot into them to install them like I can Ubuntu. Whenever I use dd to write to a USB drive for Ubuntu, a 'grub' option pops up which I then can click on and install accordingly.

However, any other distribution I put onto my USB drive in various ways (dd, unetbootin), is simply recognized as a 'Legacy OS' or a Linux installation (little tux logo). However, when I boot into any of those options, it simply sits at a black screen with a cursor flashing. Does anyone have any ideas I can possibly try?

[Roderick W. Smith]

There are a lot of "black screen" problems when booting recent Linux distributions on a variety of EFI/UEFI hardware (not just Macs). Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of different causes for these problems, so there's no one solution -- the solutions vary from one computer to another. One common solution, though, is to add nomodeset to the kernel options. (You'd need to do this in GRUB, which is probably what rEFInd launches.)