I had a really bad experience when trying to install 11.10 on that machine (brand new).

First, the "normal" desktop installer didn't work. The machine booted well from the stick, I checked everything and it seemed ok before trying to install. But the install itself then wasn't possible since the installer basically failed to open any window on the screen.

So I switched to the alternate install. Everything went fine up to the big install run for all the software packages. This step then simply failed without any indication whatsoever about what went wrong.

I tried to fiddle with it and basically found that the problems was with the graphics card, a radeon. But I found no way to have it work, even vesa wasn't possible. A dramatic failure.

Now, I had seen that this machine worked for others with Ubuntu and that it is even sold in some places without pre-installed legacy OS, but obviously no one yet had tried 11.10. And in fact, the install of 11.04 worked flawlessly, the machine is now up and running great with 11.04.

In summary, I think that there really must have been a problem with the quality check for 11.10. So I can only suggest for everybody who has a machine in that class (mainly the radeon chip is in question I think) not to upgrade to 11.10 before these issues are solved.