I last wrote about Ubuntu last year after having played with it for a while. However, I quickly gave up on it as it never worked with our wireless network, and also my PC at the time was dying a slow and intermittent death which didn't help matters.
A new PC and nearly a year later I'm trying again, this time with the newer Ubuntu 7.10.
I download the CD image and burn it to a disk, then reboot and set my BIOS to boot from CD. Up pops a menu, I pick the option to make it run the Live CD and the screen goes blank and never returns. I try again in safe mode with the same result. After Googling for a while (back in Windows) I discover, after a few red herrings, that the distro doesn't come with drivers for my shiny GeForce 8800 GTX. The workaround appears to be to change the boot command line so it runs with no splash screen.
This works, so I get Ubuntu installed onto my drive (Vista earns a point here for being able to resize its partition out of the box without a reboot). I then boot to a command line so I can make the same "nosplash" hack to the GRUB boot file and setup Vista to be the default OS - as with 7.04 it simply made an assumption of the user upon install instead of asking me.
In the desktop and everything seems peachy, except once again there's no driver for my wireless card (a completely different card to the one in my last PC - what are the chances???), and Googling around it looks like there isn't one at all for x64 Linux (yet). Looks like I'll have to play with NDISwrapper again swapping back and forth between Ubuntu and Windows to get the files downloaded and installed.
Dude, I decided to leave Ubuntu alone and moved on to Linux Mint. It's based on ubuntu, but it does actually work out of the box! No dicking around with media players, flash plugins or anything. Out of the box. Install. Done.
Even with ATI vid cards :O
I did get NDISwrapper working after some dicking about (and I upgraded to 8.04 while it was online). It worked *ONCE* and then on the next reboot it just decided it was never going to connect again, and playing with the settings in the network settings applet just tells me I don't have permission to change settings, even if I sudo it.
Brave man, installing an alpha version of an OS.
I gave up on NDISwrapper pretty quickly, having similar problems. Fortunately I managed to get the bcm43xx driver to work, and I'm not touching it ever again.
You could have sarcastically made the same alpha comment about Vista, though in the case of Ubuntu, the alphaness is just in a few packages. Almost all of the distribution is good solid well tested software.
bcm43xx isn't any help as my wireless card isn't based on a Broadcom chipset. It's the MadWifi driver for me, but the AR5007 chipset isn't quite supported.