I arrived home to find a package sticking out of the mail box. I retrieved it and found it to be a large padded envelope from The Netherlands. Cool, 6 x86 sts, 9 PPC sets and 1 AMD64 set of Ubuntu CDs! It was painless to boot the Live CD on my iBook (600MHz G3 16VRAM model, 640MB RAM) but when Gnome finished it was stuck at 640x480. Ick, and there isn't an easy way to force it to the native 1024x768 w/o doing the long and involved "expert" boot option. It basically involves telling the X server some of the sync rates and to use DDC. I Googled a bit but only found options for editing the X config files for a full install. I'd sure like a nice quick boot: command line to get it to work, but alas... So I tried it on the old iMac G3 350MHz (slot-load w/o FW, 256MB RAM) but the OF setting that it has for OS X don't like to boot the CD by just holding the 'c' key down. So, I had to drop to Open Firmware and use "boot cd:,\install\yaboot" to get it to boot the CD. After that it took off just fine and Gnome came up in full color and 1024x768 res. I'm posting this from the iMac running under the LiveCD right now. I also booted the old Dell Optiplex GX1 box (P-II 400MHz, 256MB RAM) and it booted and ran fine. It seemed a tad slower than the iMac, but that may have been the DVD drive in the Dell. The CD drive in the iMac seems to be faster to spin back up and deliver data. It took almost the same amount of time to get Firefox loaded as to get an Xterm going, both on the iMac.
I've got a few old K6-2 boxen sitting around that might benefit from a new OS (either kill a Win2k or WIn98 install ;) ) but that'd involve swappig the peripherals off the Dell.
All-in-all the LiveCDs aren't bad. For a new user, I'd sure like to see all the text screens that swap back and forth and flash strange (to the uninitiated) messages at you during boot to be hidden, like it seems is done during the boot from a HDD install. If I were a Windows user trying Linux for the first ti9me with Ubuntu, it'd be a nice exercise, but the boot might scare me off if I was used to watching the Windows logo for most of the boot process.
Jon.