Years of waiting are now over. I have succesfully configured an instance of the Ubuntu Server v6.06 (Dapper Drake) on a VMWare machine and I'm over the top with joy! All these years, my linux experience has been somewhat "limited". I had installed all sorts of distros but never had a reason to drill down anymore. Played with the UI and a few apps and that was it, and even though I have been a using BSD and Solaris for quite sometime I never had to learn more than the basics (moving files around, writing scripts, making coffee (java), tailing logs, grepping, etc.). This time though, I not only installed Apache , Tomcat and Java 5 ; I went to great lengths adding a second hard-disk, partitioning, extending my swap to the second disk, installing and uninstalling Oracle 10g XE etc. All sorts of "advanced" stuff ;-) I have now a fully functioning virtual Ubuntu server on VMWare (love this stuff), with Apache, Tomcat and Oracle . I can ssh to them from my cygwin, I