Though many, including myself, prefer to use multiple partitions, for a new-comer like yourself, only using 1 partition would be advisable. Since you stated that you were switching from Vista to...

err, I don't have access to a Debian system at the moment, so just as root aptitude update; aptitude upgrade; aptitude search wifi . You should find it.

>Wifi. It sees my card, sees my network, tries to connect, then fails. I can connect from my iPod, nit not Ubuntu. Aaaah.

I've experienced similiar problems when installing on my parents/relatives...

I would recommend Arch Linux, as it is i686 compiled and relatively simple.
Here are some links on the philosophies of Arch:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/The_Arch_Way...

>Since you don't seem to be understanding the point I'm trying to get at, let me try another way. Mac OS X is officially certified as Unix. Since it's Unix, it can run Unix software. Now do you get...

>well it's true.

That doesn't strike me as a particularly convincing argument.

>That's incorrect, there is more software available for Windows than for any other operating system.

I'm dubious.

installing vmware tools might speed things up a bit

mm apparently you didn't believe me.

No. Its completely virtual. Your harddrive for all intents and purposes to debian is the space you alloted when first creating your virtual machine. (usaully 4-8 gb)

Did you burn the image or is vmware booting from the image on your computer? I haven't used vmware extensively but booting from a real cd would probably be easier.

For just programming vmware should be fine. Debian is pretty straight forward you shouldn't have problems.

>After talking to a friend, I'm thinking of running Virtual PC instead of partitioning my drive. Anybody know of pros and cons regarding both methods?

If you want to run a virtual machine I would...