Hello all,

I am looking for your suggestions. I wish to use Linux but I am little paranoid. I have this HP laptop with not really great configuration. This is HP Pavilion dv6500 series laptop with 1.5 GHz Pentium Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM and nVidia GeForce 8400 GS graphics card running Windows Vista Home Premium.

I own this laptop for past 2.5 years and had pretty much all important stuff on it, like Visual Studio, MS SQL Server 2005 (complete installation) and used IIS extensively.

On Linux, I am planning to install Netbeans (Java IDE) and Oracle server, and PHP + Apache + MySQL (probably later on, but anyways I will).

Initially I tried using VMWare 2 and create virtual Linux machine. But had 2 issues: (though I was not able to install Ubuntu properly)

1) I was not able to run my internet wi-fi connection along with VMWare. Dunno why?

2) VMWare, without any virtual machine, took about 1.5 GB of RAM.

Later on, I found a Linux Windows Installer on Ubuntu site which says that this will create Linux partition with dual boot capabilities.

My issues/questions are:

1) Ubuntu Windows Installer: Has anyone used it before? Is it safe to use? I just don't want to mess up my whole setup of Visual studio, sql server etc as I don't have Windows OS at my disposal right now.

2) My university is providing access to many MS products including Vista, Win 7 etc (some kind of alliance with MS). I am planning to download them and clean format this system. This system came with recovery partition and I burned it on DVDs. Just wanted to confirm if this is OK to destroy this partition? I know I am contradicting my previous statement, but that was aimed at installing Linux now while formatting can wait till I get some free time.

So what will you guys suggest? Using windows installer for Ubuntu or using VMWare? And what are your thoughts on formatting this system when I have Win OS ISO Image in hand? I am on my own right now and not in position to pay anything to anyone if something goes wrong.

Thank you.