I rebooted the machine, stuck the CD in and had a look at the desktop. I couldn't access the web even though I have a DHCP server running on my own workstation. My son's Macbook, sitting a few metres away, has no problem picking up an IP address from my workstation; the same goes for my daughter's Windows laptop which is also positioned nearby.

Once again, fixing this is child's play for someone of my vintage; open a terminal and run "sudo dhclient <network_interface_name>". But then is a new user, one of those possible "converts", supposed to know this?

In sharp contrast to the PC on which I tried to install Ubuntu, the monitor I used is a new one, a 22-inch LCD; I run Debian for the AMD64 on my workstation and setting up the monitor to yield an image that used the entire screen was very easy.

On Ubuntu, the image looked distorted - something like a smaller image yanked sideways. When I ran the xserver set-up on Debian, the monitor was picked up correctly so there shouldn't be any reason why Ubuntu cannot emulate this behaviour. One more minor irritant - the time zone that came up for me during the installation was wrong. It was off by an hour.

These annoyances are really of no consequence to me since I don't plan to run Ubuntu on any of my PCs. But then I'm not the target audience. Presumably, the targets are those who are looking for a Linux that installs easily and allows one to carry out normal day-to-day tasks without breaking out into a cold sweat.

I may try again later in the day and tweak things so that I can install it but in all honesty it's been a sore disappointment. The name of the release - Feisty Fawn - seems a bit juvenile to me but that's a personal opinion; had it worked as expected, you could have called it any damn thing, I don't care. Right now, it's just dead on arrival.

P.S. At the start of the installation procedure - the language selection screen - a message says "if you have internet access, read the release notes for information on problems that may affect you." A link to the release notes is provided but when the system cannot obtain an IP address from a working DHCP server, how is one expected to access the internet?

{moscomment}

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