Keith Watson wrote:
A colleague tried to install it on his WinXP laptop and it loaded perfectly and ran ok but WinXP objected. But we now think that was a grub + hardware issue and nothing to do with ubuntu.
I've installed Ubuntu on three different machines now and had generally very good experiences.
The first worked flawlessly on a very simple box with everything onboard.
The second was on a very meaty server. It installed fine but wouldn't boot up, I'm pretty sure this was an issue with GRUB and the BIOS. I tried to flash the BIOS, broke it, had to send it off to Wales to have a new BIOS soldered on and then Ubuntu installed without a problem.
The third was my main PC at home, very average spec with a large variety of hardware. I was extremely impressed with the amount of hardware it got working, unfortunately the graphics card wasn't one of these pieces of hardware. I think Ubuntu was trying to use the onboard graphics which is switched off in the BIOS, or something odd. After hacking around with X for a bit it's now all working. (well, apart from my DVB-T card, but let's be realistic).
I'm now a big fan of Ubuntu, it has the philosophy of Debian but a more practical release schedule and impressive hardware support and default setup.