My latest dual boot fun is with PCLinuxOS. If Ubuntu is the most solid of recent easy to set up distros, then PCLOS is the fastest and most complete out of the box.
PCLinuxOS is quite similar to Mandriva One in the way it goes about installing from the liveCD; I was asked to identify my internet connection as I installed and then asked if I wanted to connect right away.
It recognized all of my hardware and was easily the fastest of all the recent distros I've tried from inserting the CD to having a fully installed system ready to go; It took less than 10 minutes to install, and correctly identified my previous installation of SabayonLinux, adding itself to the GRUB menu under SabayonLinux.
I have since decided not to stay with SabayonLinux, as the Gentoo underbelly is still a bit tough for me to handle; just to emerge ktorrent took the system nearly ten minutes, so if I was going to add some really large components, then we're talking several hours for it to check the dependencies.
Back to PCLOS; even though it uses the rpm packages, it oddly installs packages with the familiar (to Debian users) Synaptic Package Manager, and the apt-get commands in the command line. The only thing that Ubuntu has on PCLOS as far as installation goes is the repositories; if you are outside the continental US this may matter to you; if not, then no worries.
PCLOS uses KDE as its window manager, and the artwork is truly wonderful, better than MEPIS in my estimation. That they can take on such well-funded giants as Mandriva and Ubuntu and produce such an excellent distro is testament to the hard work of the developers, all volunteers as far as I'm aware.
One note to those who want to live on the ragged edge and dual boot; have one distro that is your sure-fire can always fall back on one, as you may see something else you like, and if in replacing one distro something goes wrong, you can still boot into the other partition. If you have the luxury of a second machine, then by all means shoot the moon and ignore the above advice.
PCLOS installed the base system in under ten minutes, but since I had to connect to servers in the US for the package updates, getting a fully up-to-date system took approximately an hour and a half. Compare that with the five minutes (maybe) for Ubuntu to deliver a full update.
I just wanted to get this up as I'm going to wipe my Sabayon install and go with something else; I'll be back to update in a little bit. Well, that was quick.
Got rid of SabayonLinux and went back to, you guessed it, Ubuntu.
One nice thing that I hadn't seen before of Ubuntu was its ability to import other users, and then add them to the GRUB menu by itself; the disk then is mounted on the Ubuntu desktop and you can swap files with it. Pretty nifty.
Something about that brown and orange I couldn't stay away from. A couple more comments about PCLinuxOS; when installing, you are offered the choice of installing to the hard drive, or to a USB thumb drive; that would come in handy if you have to use a Windows computer but are used to Linux.
You could insert the USB drive and then save all work, everything to the spare part of the one gigabyte (or larger) thumb drive; when you exit all signs that you have been on the computer are gone. I probably won't stick with PCLinuxOS for long; just wanted to see what the installation experience was like, and to provide some further info to folks who are looking at other options; as several commenters below have said, Ubuntu has by far the best forums and the friendliest environment for new users (sometimes called 'newbies)'; if you have a question it is usually answered in a matter of hours.
I'm sorry if I gave the impression that I didn't like Ubuntu or wasn't going to use it anymore; just got a bit restless with all the really tempting new distros out recently and had to try them out. As it's just too time-consuming to reset my bookmarks and spelling dictionary in Firefox, I'll likely try to revive my test machine and see how that handles Fedora 7 (no longer called Fedora Core, as the two branches have merged), as well as OpenSuse 10.3 Alpha 4, as soon as I can get ktorrent going again.
Here's a funny vid from Youtube on PCLinuxOS: