I am posting this from my newly configured XP x64 within Ubuntu Hardy Heron set up on my laptop. It was not super easy, but it was not super hard either. I am confident that anyone that can follow directions can accomplish a cool setup like this. I've done two Ubuntu installs and finally have everything working.

So first off, this laptop comes with Vista. It is horridly bloated with stuff you don't really need that HP threw in to frustrate us. I did not like this Vista, but I decided I paid for the license for Vista when I bought the Laptop, so I don't really want to just throw that away, but I want Ubuntu 8.04 and XP. Solution: Dual boot Vista and Ubuntu, then use VMware to run XP inside Ubuntu whenever I boot there.

So basically its a dual boot with three operating systems. My computer science buddies at work (I work at an ITS Help Desk) might even be impressed! Lets get started.

First off I am not a linux guru by any means. I know several, but I am not onemyself, I am just a firm believe in the logic that if I'm having a computer problem, someone else has had that same problem and posted something in a forum somwhere and someone told them how to fix/do it. I will be linking to best guides I have found to configure this setup.

So lets get started. Everything in this guide is in the order that I did it to finally make it all work.

Clean Install of Vista
This will make your Vista run much faster. It will also allow you to divide up the partitions however you would like to accomidate your Ubuntu/XP stuff.

This guide should work flawlessly. I cannot possibly thank OREV for this guide enough. You rock OREV!
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228

*Note* When you are re-partitioning your drive to install this you have to make some descisions that will greatly affect your Ubuntu work.

The way I see it is you have two options. 1) Put your OSes into smal partitions and use the majority of your hard drive as a shared media partition. 2) Keep your two OSes seperate and assume they won't play nice together anyway so don't teach them to share. This will probably depend alot on what size hard drive you have. This laptop has a 150GB drive, so I let mine share. I put Vista in a 10 GB partition, Ubuntu in a total of about 25GB (so I could install XP in there w/o having to worry about stuff) and the rest is a media partition.

So at the step where you partition your hard drive in your new Vista install you need to decide this. If you want to share your media partition you have a couple options for the format. You don't have to pick one until later (during the linux install) but I'll go ahead and put this in here to help you decide if you want to try to let them share. You can choose a filesystem that Linux and Windows can both share, or you can use a product for windows that will allow it to read Ext3 Filesystems. I have not tried this yet, but here are some links with useful info:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=430184
http://www.reviewingit.com/index.php/content/view/52/2/
http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/0...-from-windows/

I don't really plan to use Vista for much. So I just put it in a small partition and will worry about letting it read my media partition if I ever need it to, which I doubt I will. I will almost certainly not need it to write anything to that partition.
I just set up my 10GB Vista partition and left the rest to play w/ during the Ubuntu install.
*End Note*

Now that you have Vista, lets dual boot it with Ubuntu so you never have to use Vista again! But of course, if you need to for some desperate reason, or you have a weird craving for Vista you can.

Dual Booting with Ubuntu

These days this is much easier than it sounds. Realy all it entails is putting the Hardy Heron Live CD in and selecting Install Ubuntu. The only thing you really have to think about here is your partitioning. Here is how I sliced it:
OS partition: 25 GB Ext3 named "/"
Swap: 2GB Swap
Media: Everything else Ext3 named "/*yourname/whatever*"
*LEAVE YOUR VISTA PARTITION ALONE, unless you've decided you want to go all out and switch to Linux...*
Here is a guide to the ubuntu install. (its a screencast)
http://screencasts.ubuntu.com/MoS200..._Ubuntu_Part_1

So after following that guide everything should work besides your wireless. Hook up to ethernet somewhere and lets get that wireless working. This computer uses one of the two broadcom cards that aren't supported with the proprietary driver maker fw-cutter, so you have to use the old school ndiswrapper. Heres how to do it:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...eisty_No-Fluff
***Make sure and pay attention to which step you need to do. For the HP DV2419us you have a bcm4328 card, so you have to follow step 2d.***

Now everything should work in Ubuntu. Install all the updates, and whatever else you want, install compiz to make cool effects w/:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

*This laptop is powerful enough to handle lots of these effects w/o hurting performance*

Now install VMware in Ubuntu

Since I made a nice big partition for Ubuntu (because I knew I didn't want to mess with putting VMware Virtual Machines on a different partition) I just followed this guide exactly:
http://www.howtoforge.com/installing...on-ubuntu-8.04

Then I installed XP x64 Server without any problems. It was automatically connected to the internet whenever my Ubuntu system was. I chose the NAT option for my virtual machine setup. I was able to connect to the internet and put Visual Studio on it no problem (I need this for many of the classes I take, it is the reason I wanted VMware and XP). I won't be using this XP virtual machine for anything else. You should definately install VMware Tools once you finish your XP install, it makes things much smoother.

So after that stuff I could not be happier w/ my computer.

**If you happen to go to the University of Texas at Austin and are experiencing problems with connecting to restricted.utexas send me a PM and I can help you get that working**

So in the end I now have an awesome laptop setup, and Ubuntu has another huge fan. Hopefully anyone that has a DV2419us and reads this post will soon share the same story!