Hi all. I'm itching to to install Ubuntu 7.10 on my winxp system.
I have already downloaded and burned the ISO and am contemplating what to do next.

I wish to hold on to my winxp install as i am no wizz kid and can foresee myself running into loads of problems with Ubuntu, however i am curious enough to give it a try.

my first question concerns partitioning. I have windows installed on a
128 Gb partition of my 250 gb SATA hard drive, the remaining 105 Gb are still unformatted space,

(now this may sound like a very silly question)

How will i format the unformatted section of the drive in order to install Ubuntu?
do i need any additional software to do this?
Should I format it in windows before i start?

My other question concerns my Belkin wireless g card, when i boot Ubuntu from the cd the network window shows all connections grayed out, (i have no hard line or modem connected to my desktop) if i disable roaming mode and enter my router's SSID and WPA paraphrase i still get no connection,
I cant tell u the make of the card but the win driver i use is labeled F5D7001_1212

Any thoughts would be appreciated

Thanks

You don't need to do anything before the installation. Partitioning is a part of the installation procedure, and it will guide you all the way through.

I'm inexperienced Ubuntu user myself, so I can't help you out with your wireless card.

ok when you boot ubuntu off the cd and it loads just click the "install icon" ont he desktop. this will ask you questions and then take you to a partitioner. click manual option and then select the unallocated (your part of the disk that not formatted) and add a 8gb root, a 20 gb /home and a swap that is double the size of you RAM (if you have 2 gb or more just make it 2bg). the rest of the free space you can format to fat32 and share it with windows and linux (format this from the install process too). its really pretty straight forward once you start to see it in front of you, im sure you wont have any problems but you should back up you data in windows just in case.

also the bootloader will automatically install so when you turn on your computer you will have the options of ubuntu or windows.

as for you wireless card it should work i think but once you are into your new install of ubuntu you will have to see. if not you still have windows so any files you need you can download with windows and put them on the fat32 partition, a flash drive of cd to get them to ubuntu.

good luck and dont let it be to scary because its very simple and will be fun for you i think

ok so i got impatient and started the install before i saw the last post, i selected the option to install on the largest free space on the disk (unpartitioned 105 gigs), anyway although i had alrady verified the disk for errors during the installation i was presented with a dialog box informing me there had been an error due to a faulty disk or disk drive, it advised me to clean the cd and try again, i did this and verified and for errors and was informed there were no errors. great!
now when i try to install Ubuntu it hangs at 46% when it tries to start the partitioner, the live session still funtions normally but it will not let me install.
If i could get into windows i could reformat the partition that was partially created when this error occurred but when i try to boot without the ubuntu cd it tells me there was an error loading the OS,
please any help would be appreciated

If you've got your XP installation CD, go to the Recovery Console, and enter:

fixmbr

This may help.

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/installing

thanks for the help people but i decided i didn't really need my xp install and anyway i think my xp disk is shagged so i'm just usin ubuntu now for the whole system, it inatalled properly this time and its running anyway.
i got a little message just at the end of the installation informing me that some security feature could not be accessed and advising me to sort it out later, dont know if this is common but it doesn't seem to be a problem yet as i cant seem to get my belkin broadcom card to detect any networks, anyway. I havent really took the time to try and figure it out so i wont ask until i'm sure i cant do it. thanks again dudes

thanks for the nice link Duck.