My HP Laptop came with the dreaded and greatly feared MS Vista Operating system on a fairly large drive, 350gb. Attempts to downgrade this to MS XPPro failed due to a lack of drivers for the chipset in the laptop, specifically, the XPPro installer did not see a hard drive in the laptop.
Arrg.
So I used gnuparted and shrunk the partition down to something more reasonable (150gb) and installed linux Fedora 9 in the remaining 100gb partition. Not too shabby… except the wireless networking refused to work. No drivers, bad drivers? dunno. At least the wired networking worked… until some updates came along and then that stopped working as well.
Today I downloaded all 800mb of linux Ubuntu v8.10 and installed it overtop of fedora 9. Manually handling the partition so that Vista would not get toasted, it went in withing 10 minutes, started up with Grub knowing about vista and everything.
I started up in Vista and all went ok.
I restarted in Ubuntu and all was ok. wireless networking worked! I downloaded some updates
and all is well.
That is the way it is SUPPOSED to work!