For those that haven't using an Ubuntu (and family) Alternate CD, it's a simplistic way to install the distribution to your PC and allows you to setup some extra niceities like Linux Software RAID as well as speeding up the whole process of installing (off the top of my head, by about a quarter). It's very retro (dude, that's sooo 2005) and personally, I prefer it. You can setup a private encrypted directory during the setup, which is very useful if you're planning on keeping confidential information on your PC. Apart from that, nothing much has changed and it's a very straightforward install. The very first boot was quite slow for some reason and I wasn't given a button to initiate updates. After a quick reboot, things were back to normal.