I was under the impression that my son had tried Ubuntu on his 3 year
old Dell laptop before I posted this question. He had tried SUSE
without success and more or less gave up due to school starting. I got
him to download both Ubuntu & Kubuntu. Kubuntu booted right up and
even recognized his wireless card, something XP never did. He had some
problems with Ubuntu live CD at first but was partitioning his hard
drive to install both Kubuntu & Ubuntu the last time we spoke. He was
having some problems connecting to the internet by wire.