You need:

• Enough space on hard drive
• Windows installation CD/DVD
• Linux/Ubuntu Live-CD/DVD (!!)
• Some time you like to waste on a Windows installation process

Instructions:

• Make sure you have enough free space on you hard disc.
• If you hadn’t install GParted, do it now.
• Make space for the Windows partition on you hard drive and create a new NTFS partition. The overview from GParted should somehow look similar to this (/dev/sda2 is my NTFS partition):
  

  GParted - partitions on hard drive

• Reboot you system, install Windows on the NEW partition on your hard drive (It is quite important to choose the right one, otherwise you Linux system could get lost). After the installation there is (currently) no way to boot you Linux system, since Windows has overwritten the Linux boot loader.
• Insert you Ubuntu/Linux Live CD / DVD and boot a Live system.
• Mount you Linux partition into you Live system. (Easiest way is: On main menu: “Places” -> “Name/size of Filesystem”
• Open a console/terminal
• Check if everything is correctly mounted and get the ID of you Linux partition. Enter:

  mount

  which should give you a line like this

  /dev/sda2 on /media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=devkit)

  Now run:

  ls /media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444/boot

  Replace 0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 with the ID given by the mount command earlier. (Tip: Use <Tab>-Key to get autocompletion.)
  The result should be very close to this:

  config-2.6.18-3-686      initrd.img-2.6.18-3-686.bak  System.map-2.6.18-3-686
  grub                     lost+found                   vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-686
  initrd.img-2.6.18-3-686  memtest86+.bin

• Overwrite the master boot record and replace the Windows boot loader with GRUB: (again insert the correct ID for the partition and make sure you perform this on the right hard drive!)

  sudo grub-install --root-directory=/media/0d104aff-ec8c-44c8-b811-92b993823444 /dev/sda

• Grub automatically detects all the installed operating system. After a reboot you should be able to chose which operating system you want to boot.
• Done.

Tip: If you do not see the grub menu during boot, press and hold the Shift key before the boot process starts.

Today I tried the same with my Ubuntu 10.04 installation and I encountered a few problems. This is how I got my webcam working with Skype:

• Check if your web cam is working in general. The program Cheese is quite suitable for this task.
• Test if Skype works with you cam. Open the options dialogue, go to “Video” and click test. If you see yourself, everything is fine
• Otherwise create a shell script with the following content:
  1. #!/bin/bash
  2. LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so  /usr/bin/skype

  This script forces Skype to use the Video4Linux drivers instead of the native ones.

• If you got this error like this:
  

  X Error, request 132, minor 18, error code 8 BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)

  Modify you script this way:

  1. #!/bin/bash
  2. export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1 skype
  3. LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so  /usr/bin/skype
• Whenever you start Skype and want to use your web cam use this script to start Skype.

P.S.: If you are on a 64bit system you probably need to do this:

It took a while to get everything running and I pulled all the information I needed from many different sites. So pulled them all together in this blog entry:

1. Register at the VMware page. Download the package for VMware server as *.tar.gz. Extract the archive.
2. Current VMware products do not support the Linux kernel 2.6.32. Therefor you need a patch for the installation archive. Download the patch from the following link and extract it in the parent folder of you VMware download: VMware patch for Linux kernel 2.6.32. More information could found on this page and pages linked on this page.
3. Run the script with super-user rights. It is quite simple to install. Most of the times you could just hit enter for every question of the installer. At one point the installer ask for a system user which runs the Vmware instances. If you leave it at the default choice, root will be the user. Make sure you have password to log in as root user. (You can set a root password by running the following command on a terminal:
   

   sudo passwd root

4. If you are running a new Ubuntu system you might have get a Firefox version >= 3.6. In these versions the VMware console plugin for the browser won’t work, so download a older version of Firefox from this page (3.5.9 should be highest working version number).
   Extract it somewhere and run it:

   ./firefox -no-remote -P

   You might create a new Firefox profile (-P) and make sure a new instance of the Firefox is starting (-no-remote)

5. On a few guest operating systems you might have some trouble with some of the arrow keys of you keyboard. To get them working run this command from a terminal:
   

   sudo echo “xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true” >> /etc/vmware/config

   You need to run this on the computer where you want to start the VMware console. More Informations could be found here.

6. Browse to you VMware administration panel (http://localhost:8222 or https://localhost:8333). Create and start a virtual machine. Install the browser plug-in. Launch the console.

VMware admin & console