I don't see why you're wasting time with VMWare. Just go the LIVE CD option. Those do not install anything on your computer, and as long as you don't do something stupid (like mount your NTFS drives as read / write, and try to save to them), you'll be fine. All VMWare is doing in this case is taking up cycles.

As for the text on your screen (the 770) that's normal for RD Mode. That's "Debugging" information that you would need if you were doing Research and Development. The standard "production" mode, hides the extra information.

I dont have the CD version of Ubuntu - I just downloaded and installed as it says in the instructions! Before I did that, I'd never even seen a linux desktop, let alone played with one so I'm afraid I was (as still am) dreadfully out of my depth!
Still, it all worked out eventually but it was a harrowing few hours though!!

Live CD's are pretty easy (and it doesn't have to be Ubuntu, it can just as well be Knoppix.) You download the CD image, burn that to a CD with some CD burning software (ImgBurn from http://www.imgburn.com/ is great and free) and then boot from the CD and you're in Linux. No fuss with VMware and direct access to the USB port.

Not sure if flasher-2.0 is fixed now so it sees modern USB implementations in Linux, but if not there is a perl one-liner somewhere on the wiki that will fix that.

Flashing via Live CD has worked flawlessly for me several times, and the great thing is that it doesn't touch your HD at all - just yank the CD and reboot and you're back in your usual desktop mode.

Wow, I didn't know I could do that!
Whare does it save all your config files, download data etc if it doesn't touch the HD?

Unless you set up either some removable medium (USB stick, floppy) or a partition on your hard disk, nowhere. Either option requires some knowledge of how Linux does things.

This is exactly the reason why I prefer VMWare (Player), especially now that I am in a situation where I don't have a dedicated Linux workstation available (temporarily, obviously): It may be trickier to install and probably more finnicky about your hardware, but VMWare also leaves your Windows partition alone (unless you foolhartedly set it up not to) and it gives you a normal Linux experience with persistent storage.

<$0.02>i agree. the live cds are also slow vs vmware. i keep my mware ubuntu on analysis external hd. </$0.02>

you should try dsl linux, might change your mind about live cd's being slow.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

I've used both livecd and vmware. If you are using the live cd, you can use a USB flash drive to store the flasher and image as they will detect and mount as a readable drive. I had to do this with a system since it didn't have a working network interface.

I have to say that my install of Ubuntu went like clockwork and then worked beautifully. I t even asked me if I wanted to upgrade to 6.something and I said 'yes' and it went away and did it. If it wasn't for Windoze locking the USB port, I would never have had a problem to start with!
As kids are asking for a PC to be connected to the TV in the living room so they can surf the net etc and I'm thinking that it may be a great opportunity to make it a linux box. Is there any media-centre type functionality available - or is that expecting too much? Will it plug in into the home network or am I going have trouble?
Thank you guys for all this advice - it's so hard to think outside the usual mac/pc box!

Ravi

While live CDs are good for flashing rootfs (a bit slow and unstable in vmware, flashing initfs or kernel is fine) they are too slow to boot IMO. In fact any booting is slow when compared to laptop standby mode :) I really hate to shutdown or hibernate my laptop just to boot linux ( http://sysresccd.org in my case) from usb stick only for reflashing my N770. Nokia should really make advanced flasher for windows or at least document that flasher.dll inside flasher wizard for windows.