Ubuntu 14.04 (or linux in general) on XServe (2,1 Early 2008)

I recently acquired an XServe 2,1 Early 2008 and have been trying to install linux on it to no avail. I can get the install to the point of detecting disks where it fails with the message: No disk drive detected.

As it asks for a driver, I'm assuming it is unable to access the drives on the hardware RAID controller.

There seems to be very little information recently about running linux on the XServe, most are from around 2009 or so before recent linux installs had proper EFI compatibility and resolved a lot of boot-loading issues. As I was immediately able to boot via USB and CD into a linux installer, I was wondering if there was any further information or possibility about using the RAID card with Linux? If not, what would be a possible solution?

(Things are working fine in Lion 10.7.x)