Getting vagrant installed on ubuntu isn’t as easy as it should be (as of v1.0.5 on 12.10). Here are a few solutions to make your life easier:

Bug 1:
I noticed that ruby + gems didn’t exist on a vanilla 12.10 install and that installing the official .deb from vagrantup.com resulted in a vagrant not found error.

Fix 1:

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sudo apt-get install ruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev rubygems1.8 virtualbox-ose
sudo gem install vagrant

Bug 2:
After running my first vagrant up with a precise64 base box, I noticed that the guest VM was having trouble with resolving domain names. Peeking at the /etc/hosts file, I saw an entry that read:127.0.1.1 precise64 After correcting this to 127.0.0.1 precise64, it still froze when pip installing some python modules. This was strange considering the guest was configured to run in bridge mode.

Fix 2: The following settings cured it:

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VBoxManage modifyvm "myvagrantbox_23901293" --natdnshostresolver1 on
VBoxManage modifyvm "myvagrantbox_23901293" --natdnsproxy1 on

Here, myvagrantbox_23901293 is the name assigned to the guest in virtualbox by vagrant and can be found via the virtualbox UI.