Installing unix...not quite successful !

Its been quite sometime i'm here. Well, moved on to a new job -- Fannie Mae, VA as a production suport DBA. But, here we go.

I was trying to install solaris on my laptop to make it a dual boot system (windows and solaris), but i was not quite successful.

After 15 hrs of work on it, i could install it, but still can't connected to the internet. Not sure if i don't have the drivers for my network card or something like that.(I have a new dell xps M140 laotop). Went through a lot of threads but could not really get the solution. It really sucked !!

Now, planning to move to ubuntu flavor of unix. Just went through some blogs and it has some excellent reviews. The new version, drapper drape is still in the beta stage, but the best thing with this is that you can have a "LIVE CD", which means that you can just try out your install on your windows machine without really installing it. May be -- u can call it a virtual install. You can even connect to internet through this live cd. If it goes fine and if you like it, then you can go ahead with the acutual install. What else do you need ? You can check out an OS even without installing it ? Amazing !!

You don't even need partition magic to format your drivers. ubuntu does that. Also, i've read somewhere that it even recognises your USB flash drivers ( I think its an NTFS format). Amazing once again (if thats true .. :) !!

I haven't tried it out yet, but i'm goin' to. By this weekend, i should have it ready (hopefully...ev. thing working).

Lets find out how amazing it is by the end of the week.