Fyodor M.
Ever since I got my company laptop, I haven't touched the home desktop much anymore. It's just so much more fun to have a clear LCD, a load of processing power and virtually no noise at all.
Machine: IBM Thinkpad T43
System: Debian Linux "Sid"
Kernel: 2.6.18-1-686
CPU: Intel Pentium M, 1.6GHz
Memory: 1GiB
Disks: 40GiB
Getting the hardware to work was a bit tricky at first - the machine has one of those horrible SATA-to-PATA bridges which aren't properly detected by the debian installer 2.6 kernel. After that first bump all went fine though: hardware 3D and compositing, burning cd's, bluetooth, gigabit ethernet and... weee... 54Mbit wireless with full WPA2-AES encryption!
0wned, WinXP.
Company policy says: you can wipe the Windows XP data partition, but not the Windows XP system partition. Hmpf. So that's a perfectly good Linux machine, stained with a Windows XP SP2 install on the first HD partition.
Now, read that policy line again. Does it mention anywhere that I have to be able to boot that Windows XP install directly? Nooo... it does not. *smirks*
Here's where the fun part comes into play: VMware is able to use native system partitions for a virtual machine. So, basically, why wouldn't it be able to boot a physical partition inside a virtual machine? Answer: no reason, it can ;-) so right now, the laptop boots straight into Linux. And the native Windows XP runs nicely inside a VMware window. Best of both worlds? Definitely!
I probably wouldn't have succeeded without the excellent info on Scott Bronson's site; make sure to read the comments, as they address lots of known problems and tricks.