>I am considering dual booting my sony vaio tower pc(XP) with ebie Feisty
>LTSP server. Now can someone tell me how de-de-dee I'm being?

That's interesting. I've just been playing around with an old PC,
trying to see whether it's capable of running Ubuntu. Lots of problems,
with the lastest distributions, but I've just managed to install the
server version of Ubuntu-5. It's a text based system.

>I am guessing that, first of all--if I do, it will of course only work
>as a server while it is actually running. Right?

Yes.

> So I can't log in to Ubuntu and start the server, then log in to XP
> for >my hubby to use? Just double checking.

That's correct, you can only run one operating system on a computer.

>Is there ANY way that I can permanently screw up my pc while trying to
>set up the dual boot system?

Yes, any operation which changes partitions, or the boot system can
cause problems. You should back-up any important data, external to the
computer. Having said that I haven't had any problems caused by
installing Ubuntu.

If you do get problems the XP installation disk can restore booting. I
can also recommend a program called SuperBoot, which can restore Windows
& Linux booting (do a Google search).

> I have cd's to do a fresh install from, but the partitioner on the
> cd's >will only give me a c and d drive. A spyware just forced me to
> do a fresh >install of XP about 2 wks ago, and I checked the
> partitioner. I don't >even recall a manual option.

IIRC XP allows you to use part of the hard disk, but can't create
multiple partitions (perhaps someone will correct me if I'm wrong :-) ).
Drive d could be your CDROM.

Ubuntu likes to install in the free space on a system, so I've usually
used PartitionMagic to reduce the size of the Windows partition, as
required.

Ubuntu installation also has a facility called Gparted to alter the size
of a Windows partition, although I haven't used that.