Well I took the plunge and put 11.04 on my vintage Acer TravelMate. I gave up on 10.10 because I could not get the laptop screen to activate after a reboot and the wireless was problematic. I spent way too much time and tried all the tips here and at other places. Well 11.04 did the exact same thing. Video worked fine during install and reboots but as soon as the laptop was off and started again. Nothing. I could hear the chime and knew it was working and not frozen.

This time I decided to dig a little deeper on the internet and low and behold I found the answer. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Ubuntu that is. I have to press CTRL +ATL+F8 to get the logon screen to appear (which is the volume Fn on this laptop). Funny thing is if I have an external monitor that step is not required. Finally now I can focus on playing with my Ubuntu. :D

I did switch to Classic and it seems snappy for a 6 year old laptop.

For old hardware "Unity/Gnome 3" might not be the way to go. You may get a better performance boost out of a Xfce desktop like Xubuntu or Mint Debian Xfce edition. The added bonus is that if the direction that Unity and Gnome 3 are taking is not to your liking the Xfce desktop experience is really close to Gnome 2.32. That pretty much my fall back plan when Canonical phase out Ubuntu classic in favour of Unity 2d.

Thanks for the heads up. I just assumed the Classic interface would remain. I actually have Classic (No effects) selected.

I seem to have hit a snag with my "Linux rollout". :) First off let me ask can I share a removable NTFS USB drive under 11.04? It does not complain so I assume the answer is yes. I am using the Classic interface.

I can see the share and have guest access enabled but it is not working.

Also who is "nobody"? Is that akin to anonymous?

Most articles talk about installing Samba but I was under the impression "Personal File Sharing" was built-in. I should not that "Personal File Sharing" dialog tell me the modules are not installed and the option is greyed out.

I don't know if you can share a whole drive but usually all you need is right click on a folder and go into Properties.

Samba allows you to communicate with the network file sharing system of Windows. As a rule, I always install it otherwise my Windows and Linux machines could never talk to each other.

There are two types (at least) of file sharing under Linux. Those are the Linux to Linux version (NFS) and the Linux to Windows version (SMB aka Samba.)