I also have the 1420 and am dual booting Vista and Ubuntu. I'm brand new to Linux myself and had no trouble doing it. I'm not in Vista right now so I don't remember the exact steps, but partitioning the drive was very easy if you get into disk management. I defragged in Vista a few times, about 3-4 to get it as small as possible. Then in disk management you can right click on to shrink the primary partition, your OS. My hard drive is 320 GB's, I shrunk Vista down to about half of it. I was then left with over 100 GB's of unallocated space. Then I went to Ubuntu.com and downloaded the .iso file. Burned it to a CD to create a live CD. When it was done, restarted my laptop, F2 while it's starting up to get to the set up and choose Boot From CD. Ubuntu will walk you through the rest, it was that easy!
I got my new laptop in the beginning of the summer, could stand vista, a lot of my older stuff, mp3 player, camera, had troube with it so I thought I'd give linux a try. At first I was switching back and forth every few days, now I have not actually booted into Windows since mid July!
One thing that helped me, use the Add/Remove programs feature. Instead of finding ways to use the same programs you used in Windows, like AOL Instant messenger, everytime I found the linux equivalent, I always liked it better. Once I got used to that, I was finished with Windows.
dwma
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Posted September 26th, 2008 05:00