I finally managed to install Ubuntu (from the DVD included in the official book, which states it’s a CD), only took ten tries, four different CPUs, and (on the final machine) five reboots. S’cool.
I can assure you that your experience installing Ubuntu is atypical.
Just out of curiosity, would you mind telling which 4 types of PCs you attempted the install on?
I’ve had that experience with other Linux distros.
I was hoping that the days of having to recompile the kernel were over, but I had to do that recently.