I've recently started using Ubuntu on the desktop. After an effortless install of 11.04 on a fairly new Dell notebook, I experienced a minor issue with the 11.10 on an old AMD Athlon 64 2800+ with a Nvidia Geforce 7600GS graphics card. I thought I would post my experiences here in case someone else experiences similar issues.
The installer kept hanging at various points in the install. I didn't put a lot of effort into discovering the exact issue. I ended up downloading the alternative install and everything went smoothly. I believe it was related to the nouveau graphics driver. The reason I think this was the issue is because after the install X would hang right after startup. I had the same issue with a Debian install. I booted into recovery mode and removed the nouveau driver and everything works fine.
I'm using Synergy to
share the mouse and keyboard between my Windows desktop and Ubuntu. The server
runs on the Windows desktop. Ubuntu 11.10 uses lightdm so the old configuration
used to autostart the client won't work. Luckily achieving autostart is even
easier than before. Simply place greeter-setup-script=/usr/bin/synergyc HOSTNAME
in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf. The synergy client will be started for login
and will still be running after login. I discovered this solution
here.