It went quite well – the only hiccup was when I tried to get it to install over my existing linux partition – I had to manually re-format the partition before it would over-write…

Timeline:
1100 rebooted pc
1101 reset boot order in bios to set dvd as first boot device
1104 setting hostname
1105 setting clock and city
1110 erasing data on existing linux partition
1115 reformat linux partition due to “can’t delete base system files” error
1116 installing base system…
1118 default user account name = <MyUserAccountName>>
1119 user = <<MyUserName>>
1120 pass = <<MyPassword>>
1121 private passphrase = <<MyPassphrase>>
1123 scanning apt mirror
1125 select and install software…
1128   … 6%
1132   …25%
1135   …43%
1138   …60%
1145   …80%
1148   …84%
1150   …93%
1151 installation complete – first reboot
1152 test grub install worked ok – booting into windows…
1157   …everything AOK – rebooting back into Ubuntu 8.10
1159 password entry screen – login
1200 “Software update available” popup … [ignored]
1201 changing apt to use internode’s mirrors…
1211   …done – sudo apt-get update…updating
1213   …updates complete
1214 “Software update available” popup…
1217   …verified updates downloading from internode
1218   …7 minutes remaining
1225   …applying changes
1228   …system restart required
1229 TADA!

After this I had to make some small changes – the first being to allow users to have blank passwords – I needed my five year daughter to be able to login simply be selecting her login icon (barbie princess) from the gdm login screen.

Relax password rules so some users can login without password

Google helped me find this page which detailed a few shell commands that needed to be done to relax the default passwords complexity rules:

Remove the password for the user with username ‘myUser‘
open a terminal
- sudo passwd -d myUser

Authorize login with no passwords in gdm
- sudo sed -i ’s/#PasswordRequired=false/PasswordRequired=false/’ /etc/gdm/gdm.conf

Authorize login with no passwords in pam
- sudo sed -i ’s/nullok_secure/nullok/’ /etc/pam.d/common-auth

Set pictures on login screen for users

This was easy, for each user I logged on and selected System > Preferences > About Me. From here I only had to click on the default picture in the top-left of the screenand select a picture.