I have an Inspiron 1525 with Vista Home Premium as installed at the factory. What I'd like to do is dual boot the laptop with Ubuntu. I've done this before with other machines, and normally you'd just install Ubuntu and it nicely handles the dual-booting. But, evidently there's a wrinkle with the 1525: the Media Direct button. Googling indicates that it's very hard to dual-boot a 1525 without Media Direct, or pressing the Media Direct button, messing up the system. Since I have the factory recovery disks, I am willing to completely reformat the drive, which currenltly has the recovery partition, the Dell Utility partition, the Vista partition, and the Media Direct partition.

Has anyone come up with a safe way to dual-boot Vista and Ubuntu, where pressing the Media Direct button while suspended or powered off won't trash the system? Ideally I'd like to leave the recovery partition and Dell Utility partition intact, remove the Media Direct partition, shrink the Vista partition in half and install Ubuntu in the released space.