[ImprovedSilence]

I see. One reason I didn't want to go that route was that the Unity bar on the left of the screen takes up too much space on a 13in screen, and I'm not confident I can get the resolution to run right, cuz I can never quite get my graphics card drivers sorted out right in Ubuntu.

[tagawa]

From the user login screen, select the classic desktop from the bar at the bottom. This works well on my machine with roughly the same spec.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I think I heard they'd removed this in Ubuntu 11.10. It's there on 11.04, at least.

[ImprovedSilence]

It's in 11.10 too, it's the gear right in the login box, as opposed to the bottom of the screen.

edit: I've become a fan of KDE recently, and I've been able to get it looking and working the best, so that's what it is for now.