Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Don't forget to adjust those privacy settings:

"When you begin using Ubuntu 12.04, it starts recording many of your activities. Such as the websites you visit, and the files you use."

http://www.aboutlinux.info/2012/04/ubuntu-review.html

There's no 'hibernate' option in XFCE.  Some discussion of this here.  I tried to proceed as described but got errors when I tried to start xfce-power-manager.  pm-hibernate does work.

I was able to get hibernate restored to the 'Action Buttons' by following these instructions.  Power manager still broken, though.

Actually, if you use 'Session menu' instead of 'Action Buttons', it gives you 'Lock Screen', 'Suspend', 'Hibernate', 'Reboot', 'Shut Down' and 'Log out'.  This is the panel item that appears as your userid.

Looks like XFCE has no 'Clean up by Name' to keep your desktop icons neatly arranged... that's a bummer...

I wanted to try some things outside of the VMware environment so I installed Xubuntu to a USB drive and booted it up on my laptop. 

VMware Player 4.02 on Xubuntu 12.04 works with this patch.  (Previously I wrote here that this didn't work but that turned out to be my error, sort of.  At  the download page you might expect the most recent version would be at the top of the list, but instead they have v. 4.0.0 at the top and you have to scroll down to get to 4.0.2.  Anyway, once I figured this out and downloaded the right version, everything worked).

I attempted to install updates, started getting errors about /scripts/casper-functions as it attempts to do the kernel updates.  Casper is part of the infrastructure it uses to boot from a USB drive.  Possibly the answer is just 'don't try to do kernel updates when booting from a USB drive', but I've done this many times in Ubuntu 10.04 without problem.  I googled for this and found a couple of messages saying removing a package called 'canonical-census' would fix this, but it's not installed.  The various versions of Ubuntu I installed in VMware Player didn't have this problem.