I'm about ready to give up on Ubuntu.

The installation on my laptop failed for no discernible reason -- it simply stopped after several hours. I restarted it and it indicated a CD-ROM failure (I hope it didn't kill the drive in my laptop by running it for hours). I've burned a new CD and I'm re-re-installing it from an external CD drive.

The installation of the server on my wife's old machine failed -- twice. The first time it installed, went to reboot and crashed on the reboot with an Error 18. I looked it up on the internet and found that it occurs on some machines when the OS tries to access larger sectors than the BIOS could handle. I re-partitioned, re-installed the software and rebooted. This time it didn't crash, went into the boot sequence but only ran for 10 seconds or so before it hard-booted the machine. It kept cycling like that 'til I turned it off.

I'm trying Ubuntu one more time on my laptop. I'm also downloading the Slackware distros, both desktop and server versions.

I'm not impressed.