You may be right about the specs but we come down to the definition of "older." The machines which have not accepted Ubuntu are all Pentium 4's with speeds of greater than 1.5 ghz. Memory has been 500mb or greater.

As people have, in the past, talked about the wonderful adaptability of Linux, especially Ubuntu, to older machines I find the endorsement lacks credibility when the sytem fails to install and we are then told that the instructions are not user friendly.