What I want to do is set it up for dual boot in my laptop...but I cant seem to setup a partition on my hard drive...XP takes the whole drive....I have 60g that I want to aprt 40/20......BUT I dont want to screw up XP cause all my work stuff is on there and lie will be most unpleasant if anything happens to XP.I have a lot PABX/Terminal/Voicemail software that only runs on windows..
well, first things first, boot off the livecd and check that all your hardware works fine under ubuntu. things to check include your ethernet/wireless/sound all work. if things dont work, you need to decide if they're critical to your computing. booting off the livecd wont make any changes to your hdd so all your data is safe
step 2a, is to back up all of your data. no matter how many people have had no trouble with the partitioning software resizing their windows partition, there's no guarantee that your particular combination of hardware wont show up an undiscovered bug and kill your windows, so the only way to be safe is to have another copy of everything. I personally don't bother with step 2 and have never had a problem, but if the data is really important to you, then it's worth backing it up
step 2b, wait 4 days for 8.04 to be moved out of beta and be officially released
step 3, install ubuntu. the default option for the 8.04 betas (and from memory the 7.10 release) is to resize your existing partition and set up ubuntu in the free'd space, and works pretty flawlessly from my experience.
alternatively, you could look into wubi, which is a new tool that works with ubuntu 8.04. it allows you to install ubuntu "into" a file on your ntfs windows partiton. this requires no repartitioning and doesnt require overwriting the windows bootloader making it very easy to reverse, but will be slightly slower because of the overheads involved
I would also like to be able to look at my XP files with Unbuntu....but MTFS might screw me there..
back in the old, old days, you'd have to jump through hoops to be able to read and write your to ntfs partitions, but today with the ntfs-3g driver it's extremely simple. I cant say for certain that it's automagic, but I dont remember having to go out of my way to get it to work on any recent release of ubuntu
I would like to run XP under Ubuntu keeping my original XP setup...
should be possible with vmware, but I couldn't tell you how. someone else might be more help