I finally got Ubuntu working on my system.
If your first reaction to that line is "wtf, Ubuntu ain't hard" then you've never tried installing it on a system with a RAID 0+1 or 1+0 configuration. Sure, the alternate install CD picks up RAID0/1/5 without an issue, but it completely crashes and burns on raid10. I had to jump through about a hundred thousand hoops just to get the installer to do its thing (including recompiling some system libraries to skate around a raid10-related bug in Debian/Ubuntu's patch set for libparted). I also had to go without a swap partition because due to the way my array was being listed after I applied the workaround (the whole array was listed three times, in addition to each of my partitions being listed as separate disks) it couldn't properly format the swap space. Speaking of that, I should probably make a swap space and enable it before I forget again, shouldn't I?
Getting the system to actually boot was just as much of a hassle and required me to write an initramfs script.
But, whatever. It works (for now).