My new box has arrived, and I've started building it up with the next LTS version of Ubuntu (not actually due for release till April). I've installed with hcmc admin logon only, added gnome-shell, and started adding applications. I'll keep hacking at this till 12.04 seems pretty stable, and then switch from my old machine by moving HDs to the new one. In the meantime, there's a lot of testing to do.