I noticed in my Start menu that I had installed VirtualBox a few weeks ago. In a bored moment, I fired it up for the first time and started up the Installer/LiveCD for Ubuntu 7.10.

When I went to install Ubuntu, I got stuck right from the get-go. I couldn't click on 'Next'! The installer screen was way too large, and the high resolution VGA drivers weren't installed yet (as Ubuntu wasn't installed yet) so I couldn't change the resolution.

Classic moment of pure ludicrous idiocy here. Those Linux folks are always so smug, with such attitude, they deserve shame when they screw up this bad. Yay for corporations with coordinated QA teams!!

And yes, I did try using tab + spacebar. Got me to the next screen (time zone map), but tab doesn't work to change button focus on that screen; once the drop-down list has focus it won't let go of it with tab. 

Geek buddy says, "That's normal. Your environment can't support graphical mode installation. Graphical mode installation is for systems that can support it. Yours can't, because your VM video card isn't on the built-in drivers list."

That's crap. Hardware vendors, not OS distros, provide hardware drivers. Generic VGA @ 800x600 is a well-established minimum common standard. You install the hi-res video driver post-install; the fact that OS distros often have the driver bundled is just a bonus. Besides, I am in graphical mode!! If it's not supported because of resolution, it should say, "Sorry, you must reboot and enter Text mode to install, because in graphical mode we want to be promiscuous with your screen real estate when installing, and we don't know how to do that with your hardware." But that would still suck. Best to just scale down these rediculous installation screens! Or, at *least* set a maximum window height to the desktop and insert ugly window scrollbars if the height has max'd out.

Sure, perhaps I can track down valid hardware drivers (in this case VirtualBox drivers) and activate them somehow at runtime, just to get to the Next button. That's not the point. Sure, I can choose install in text mode. That's not the point, either. The point is that this is lunacy. If they just scaled down these windows, the user experience would have been acceptable. It's like these Linux people DEMAND and ENFORCE that you geek out just to get yourself initiated. Yet they keep bragging about how user-friendly Ubuntu and other distros like it are.