I am using an Windows 7 HP desktop. I just partitoned the hard drive to have a 8GB swap partition and a 128GB /ext4 mount point "/" partition. The installation went beautifully. I saw the dialog box that shows progress and talks about various Ubuntu features and also have some images. Then I was given a dialog saying it had finished and needed to restart. When I restart I got a login prompt. After logging in all I have is the orange Ubuntu desktop background and
ubuntu (r) 14.04 LTS
at the lower left.
Is it doing something the first time and the desktop will come up after some length of time, or was this a bad install?
EDIT: Since asking this question I went to check on the computer and the screen is now black, with a cursor icon in the middle that is not responding to mouse movement and an underscore in the top left corner.
EDIT2: I restarted and chose "Additional Options" and started with the Ubuntu choice that ends with (recovery mode). I ran the fsck option and two of the entries it printed out ended or were followed by "FIXED". I then restarted and got an Ubuntu session that I used successfully for an hour. I logged in and out successfully. But then the problem reappeared following later login attempts that don't use (recovery mode -> then continue normal boot). For non-recover-mode boots I can get to the login prompt every time. One time it froze at that point, but most of the time it freezes after accepting my password. The freeze will normally just display the background, but once it showed the launcher on the side as well.
After booting via (recover-mode -> resume normal boot) this is what I see in System Settings->System->Software & Updates->Additional Drivers
Try setting your start options to nomodeset, acpi=noapic, and other switches. Here's how: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132
If you're able to successfully boot into a normal session this way, the first thing to do is install drivers for your video card. After that, it should work normally.