Hello,
I have cc’d in the baord so that this is available for public consumption. if you follow the instructions at the website : http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardUbuntu. That should get you up and runnign - I found no surprises in the insturctions and I had ubuntu running well. I used the xfce4 desktop environment, however I did find that in general Angstrom running with Enlightenment was quicker in the UI sense.
Cheers,
Neil