Edit: I installed it will the help of yahoo answers, thanks anyways guys.

part of the installation process for ubuntu will allow you to leave your existing windows system intact. you would need existing spare disk space for this though, so if you have unused partition space, then that's great, if not you'd need to free some from the shackles of windows using a tool like partition magic. you can then choose per boot to use linux or windows.

and wine / cedega / crossover office are similar compatability layers to run generic windows software / games / specific popular programs respectively, but i'd urge you try to to find native equivalents first...

So I would partion off my free disk space and then install Ubuntu to that area?

I'm not running Vista, but XP on my laptop with Kubuntu (because I like the KDE desktop). Here's what you need to do:

1) you need free hard drive space outside of the Windows partition. This means that you might need to use a program like Partition Magic or something to shrink your Vista partition and free up some hard drive space. The most important thing to remember about this whole step is this: Make sure you back up everything and that you have a means of recovering Vista, should all of this fail. Another partition on your hard drive from a vendor is not good enough. You want a disk that you can reinstall from.

2) Once you have your space, boot up your copy of Ubunutu and run through the install script. That should about do it.

Regarding your question about Windows stuff on your Ubuntu install, you can run some programs using the Wine emulator, and there are a few others out there for various things. not to mention anything really basic, like bat scripts, you can write in a file and transport it to Windows.

hope this helps.

May be you can try Ubuntu on your existing windows machine using VMware. Once you are comfortable, you can backup your data on an external drive and forget about your windows for ever

http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/
http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
http://isv-image.ubuntu.com/vmware/

Careful about the terminology. You can have free space in a partition, but to make new partitions, you need free space--i.e. unpartitioned-- on the disk. To make matters worse, Windows refers to partitions as "drives".

With Linux, of course, all terminology is totally clear and unambiguous...

If you have enough free drive space, you really don't need to partition anything, beforehand. As Chris said, Ubuntu will give you the options automatically during installation, and will allow you to choose which OS to boot on startup. Just make sure you leave space for Windows to 'grow'.

Cheers

wine is not an emulator. technicalities are there for a reason.

Why would you need partition magic?

Maybe I'm missing some reason Ubuntu/Vista differs from what I just did with Mepis/Windows2000, but I don't think so.

1) Defrag the NTFS partiton. I booted in Ultimate boot CD for Windows rather than in win2000, because my win2000 was sick at that time. That also lets you kill the swap file before defragging, and improves defraging a little in other ways. But I think defragging the NTFS partition from inside Vista should be good enough.

2) Boot the Linux liveCD. There are a few obvious places in the Mepis GUI that bring you to the tool for shrinking an NTFS partition. I won't guess that tool is in the same place on a Ubuntu liveCD, but I expect it isn't too hard to find. I think Partition magic may do that job better when you can't defrag the NTFS first. I couldn't get the Linux tool to shrink the fragmented NTFS partition, but I had no problem shrinking the NTFS after it was defragged.

3) Create partitions for Linux is the space you freed up by shrinking the NTFS partition.

I don't know enough about your specific situation to guess how much free space you should leave inside the NTFS partition when you shrink it.

Vista is supposed to be able to resize partitions.

Wubi claims to install Ubuntu on Windows.

Have you tried Ubuntu as a live CD yet?

OK guys thanks so much, I got everything sorted out I think, now I just need to know how to boot from a CD.

Place the boot CD in the drive, and restart your system. Most PCs are preset to boot from CD drive first. If yours is not, you'll need to change that setting in BIOS and try again.

Cheers

OK my computer doesn't boot from the CD automatically, so how do I make it do that? (I don't know that the BIOS is)

I've been booting CD's in a lot of different computers lately. In most of them, someone had the sense to turn off the feature to default boot from CD. It's gets real inconvenient when you forget to remove CDs. In some computers the BIOS writer left that feature out entirely.

All those computers had a key you could press (usually right after the first beep as the computer starts) that causes them to bring up a boot menu from which you could select booting from a CD this time without changing the default for next time. That makes much more sense than changing the default. I've used some older computers without that feature, but no new ones.

Surprisingly few of those BIOS's displayed info about that key while starting. Mostly you need to know which key and when to press it. For all the computers I've tried recently it was one of three keys (ESC, F8, or F12) and you press it right after that beep on BIOSs that beep early in boot up, or press it while memory size is being counted on older BIOSs that spend noticeable time counting memory.

If none of those do anything (bring up the boot menu or the BIOS setup screen), try the Delete key instead (same time during boot). On systems that ignore those other three keys, Delete (at the right moment) probably brings up the BIOS setup screen, from which you can probably change the default boot sequence.

Ok, so I booted from the CD now I'm installing it and I chose a custom install because I want to partition the hard drive so that Vista isn't deleted. How do I do that?

Screenshot:

http://img126.imageshack.us/img126/1...installed4.png