This is my first intstallation of Ubuntu, and I am not certain what to expect. It seems to me that panels (windows, whatever) load quite slowly, and it seems to appear in three steps on the display. (Using vbox on an Asus laptop.)

Also, the mouse cursor turns on and off (true, it is mostly on), and does not seem to maintain focus. (Sometimes when I want to click in something in a window, I get something on the side-panel (or a balloon from the side-panel) instead of what I want.

I think this may be a timing issue, but sometimes samba is unable to connect to the host and machines connected through it. It is obvious that samba sets up correctly "out of the box", since often I can see the shares I expect.

The next comments should be posted in another thread. But, as an absolute newbie to this, I'm not sure where. When I attempt a "mount -t vboxsf", it tells me it doesn't know the type. Other related threads seem to discuss groups (e.g., vboxsf group), but this seems a bit more basic than that.

Except for performance issues (and my unfamiliarity with Gnome and Unify (or Unity)), Ubunto seems to be an excellent distribution. Previously, I used SuSE, but I can't get samba to work at all in that most recent distribution.

I can use my SuSE installation, since I've got the shared file system mounted (something I can't do in Ubuntu); I prefer the SuSE with respect to user interface and speed.