OK, I have tried every way I know to install Ubuntu 10.10 on this stupid box, I give up. It always throws some dumass error whatever I throw at it. I give up. Moving on to a download of Fedora.
Maybe this box is just cursed. My retarded stepson blew it up with virii a couple of times, but I wiped it clean and put XP on, by the numbers, a couple of times. It just don’t like that Linux stuff. May be time for new hardware.
I have successfully run a variety of Linux distros on a Dell Optiplex GX240 with only 512mb of RAM. You might try some earlier versions of Ubuntu. Version 8 is rock solid. A lot of changes have been made over the last several releases and sometimes not for the best. It may take a while for the latest bugs to be corrected in the latest version.