I ran into problems with the Ubuntu install CD where it would kernel panic or lock up trying to access the CDROM. It really really sucks that they didn't test it on more hardware. However, what fixes it in about 90% of the installs that result in a kernel panic is simply adding "IDE=NODMA" to the boot parameters. (To do that, on the first menu that comes up after booting from the CD, hit F6 to bring up the boot parameters, get rid of the '--' on the end [Never did figure out what '--' is suppose to mean, anyone know?] and add IDE=NODMA to the end.) For some reason, the Ubuntu installer is trying to access the CD with something messed up in the Direct Memory Access (DMA).

However, I've still found the normal Ubuntu installation to be so problematic on some machines that if I have any problems, I switch over to the ubuntu-server iso and do the installation from that instead (Still doing the IDE=NODMA thing with that). You end up with a text-only install of Ubuntu, but can fix that once it's installed with 'sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop'.

I really like Ubuntu once it's installed, but the actual installation is a huge pain. (What's funny is that it installs under Microsoft Virtual Server with absolutely no problems (Other than having to tweak /etc/X11/xorg.conf to drop the color depth down to 16 from the default 24 since Virtual Server doesn't support higher than 16 bit color, so your initial install looks all screwy.) which I thought would lead to more problems that installing on a physical machine.)

I'd also edit /etc/apt/sources.list and get rid (or comment out) the line that starts with 'deb cdrom:', and make sure the lines right below starting with 'deb http' and 'deb-src http' are NOT commented out, that way it get's it's updates from the net rather than the local CD which is occasionally flaky as well.