>>> No newbie is ready to install any OS, period, although I believe it's also a basic skill that everyone should have. I've been installing operating systems since I was nine - granted, it was MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.1, which is basically wipe the hard drive and start again. I had problems back when I was trying to install Linux the first few times - Red Hat Linux 4, which didn't have the slick partitioning tool that I got with SuSE 7.0, and for which I had loads of LILO failures (I'm realising now that I probably should have made a /boot partition back then, which I forgot), requiring me to boot from floppies. However, I've been installing Linux on a separate hard drive since my old Pentium 3 and have only moved back to a single hard drive since my second hard drive won't fit in my box. You'll be wondering where I'm going with this, but I've got a point. My point is that I've noticed that perhaps Ubuntu is not the easiest version of Linux to install. I've rarely had problems with installing SUSE, which is known to have one of the easiest and slickest installations of any Linux distribution, leading me to remark when installing Windows on my old faulty 160GB hard drive, which has taken me several days to do sometimes, "There are only two operating systems which will always work for me: DOS and Linux". While SUSE has its flaws - it's better known as a business OS than an appropriate home desktop Linux (leading me to use Debian - that's pure Debian, as I'm capable at this stage of managing a more technical distro - on my single-OS laptop, with openSUSE only being used as a backup for my desktop), the package management isn't as good as an apt-using Debian-based installation or even the home of RPM, Fedora/Red Hat Enterprise, and it's rather slow to respond - I'd be more inclined to recommend it as a full-time (as opposed to Live-CD) home desktop for first-time users who want to install their own operating system. Ubuntu has the advantage for non-business users when somebody else can sort out the snags in its installer, and isn't bad in the business environment either - I'm considering that the business environment will want technical support here, which justifies my next comments - although Red Hat and SLED are probably better bets if you're using Linux as a Windows replacement and you don't mind paying, with Debian, SLES and Red Hat Enterprise Server being more popular for high-power computing. However, there are easier installers out there, and the Internet isn't exactly lacking in reports from people like yourself who have been annoyed at not being able to install Ubuntu.