dear community,
i have got my hands on ubuntu 8 (hardy heron) and fedora 9 and also got a bootable USB version of damn small linux....now the trouble is i cannot actually install any other operating system apart from vista (that is just another loathsome option!)...all of the above OS work on my desktop PC which is intel C2D e6320 processor with an intel d965ryck motherboard...
please guide me what to do on this as i need to use some sort of linux on it.....currently i am using vmware's virtual machines to satisfy my craving for linux but it is a very RAM hungry option and i would rather go for a dedicated LINUX OS...

mary...

You don't say what the problem is when you try to install....

Select one of the Linux versions and boot the computer from the CD. Tell us the following--as applicable:
Can you boot from the CD?
Does the live linux work?
Can you run the installer?
What happens at each step? error messages, etc.

Note that any computer pre-configured with Windows probably has the whole disk partitioned. This means that you typically have to modify the Windows partitions before installing Linux.

ok..
i m making it very brief...my laptop came with 2 partitions..one had 208 gb of hard drive with vista pre-installed and other was a 12 gb of space which was a hp's recovery disk partition(i can actually press f11 at boot and start vista recovery from that partition)...
now the issue is my linux boot cd says its installing and at the end my laptop freezes...i have to reboot and the cycle goes on....i am forced at using vmware....i can boot from fedora 9 live cd and actually i am using it right now...

looking for luck!
mary

OK--we are getting closer, but you will still have to be more specific in what you are doing.

Do I understand correctly that you are able to boot and run the live CD if you do it from VMWare? Regardless, lets save that option for later.

Some semantics:
Booting from live CD is not installing---the computer will only read from the CD into RAM (memory) and will not **install** anything on the hard drive.

Installing Linux means to copy it to the hard drive (in its own partition), and can be done AFTER booting from a live CD, or after booting from a CD that is designed for installation only.

So:
Can you boot the computer from a live CD? If not, tell us in detail what happens. (Don't use VMWare for now.)

Regardless of how you INSTALL Linux, you will need to re-size your Windows partition (the big one). If the computer has been used a lot, you might need to de-fragment also. I think the best way to resize the partition is using a tool like GParted. This very well may be on one of your live CDs, or it is available as a standalone CD.

You won't get far with any of this if the computer won't boot from a CD---so we need to fix that first.