The desktop installer was buggy, so it took me about 8 tries to get it right. Maybe the alternative installer would have worked better, but I did get this one to work. The workarounds aren't hard once you know what they are. After I got it all figured out (that took a day or so), the total time to do the installation was probably about 1 hour, but only about 30 minutes of my time was needed. I was installing Xubuntu as the sole OS on an Intel Compaq machine that is a few years old. This is what I did to get it to work: (1) Use gparted live CD to partition the HDD: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php I made a 500 MB partition for linux-swap and the remaining volume went to an ext2 partition. If I used ext3 instead, the installer crashed. When I used gparted within Xubuntu to partition, it crashed the installer. This is why I am recommending the gparted live CD. (2) Reboot with the Xubuntu CD in the CD drive. (3) Wait for the desktop to appear (could take a few minutes). (4) Turn off the screen saver (I was told it can cause problems). (a) right click on desktop and wait for a menu to appear (b) choose "Settings" in the menu and "Settings Manage" under that (c) click on the Screensaver icon (d) in the upper right "mode" menu, choose "Disable Screensaver" (e) click the 'x' in the upper right of the windows to kill them (5) Right click the Install icon on the desktop and choose "Execute" from the menu that appears (normal clicking or double clicking the icon did not work for me). (6) Follow the simple instructions until you get to the partitioning stage (7) In the menu for the partition manager choose "manually edit" and click "forward" until you get to the menu for mounting. Leave the check marks on for "Reformat?" in your HDD partitions. This must be done because of a bug in the installer. (8) Let the installer do the installing. It will take a while (30 minutes for me). (9) You can choose to restart when it has completed, but for me it did not restart correctly and I had to power down. When I turned the power back on it booted normally and the system looks fine. So far it is looking great. The network is working. I'm glad I did it. But I'll say this: If they really want this thing to take off and they want ordinary people to use Ubuntu, they *really* have to make the installation work as well as they possibly can. The installer does a great job of getting things working, but it is way more bug-ridden than it should be. The bugs are not just annoying and they would definitely stop many people from completing the installation. Mike