Streaming from a Koala/Win7 torrent box + sharing one G1 MacBook with your girlfriend

Yeah yeah, every tech website out there has a how-to for dual-booting a laptop.  And yeah yeah, triple booting a Mac has gotten infinitely easier since Microsoft ditched the MBR for (the possibility of) an EFI-based system (after releasing an entire OS that even Microsoft's most die-hard fans thought was bunk).  It's when you have
2 laptops
        1 1st Gen MacBook
                2.GHz Core Duo
                2 GB RAM
                320 Gig upgraded drive, that currently has OS X/Win7/Ubuntu/170 gigs out of 190 potential storage after the OS's
        1 HP Pavilion dv2000 Entertainment PC
                1.6 GHz Celeron
                2 GB RAM
                120 Gig harddrive, mostly unused
3 harddrives
        1  60GB SATA drive + external enclosure (empty, because everything was moved off of it)
        1  60GB FireWire drive used for backing up/booting for installing OS X from an 8GB bootdisk
        1 120GB SATA drive
        1 320GB SATA drive
2 multimedia lives
        30 GB music library
        30 GB iTunes library copies
        66.3 GB movies
        13 GB TV shows
1 income
that things get a little dicier.

Here's the plan:
1 server
        made from the HP
        Mainly Ubuntu
        Win7 as an option
        Shared user space between OS's, between two users
1 external
        320 GB harddrive for the server to read from/download to
1 useable laptop
        120 GB: room for two OS's, two users, and a fair amount of shared storage
        Feasibly usable by two people as the only computing resource:
                cut down on causal usage at home
                cut down on working at home
                cut down on travel baggage


And here's the process:  live-blogged and summarized afterwards.

Step 1. BACKUP.
Yeah yeah, everyone says to do it.  The sweet part about this plan is that no data will actually ever get wiped.  But, I did it anyways, just because if this HP machine turns out to be janky, I don't want it to be my fault.  (That is to say, if taking apart my girlfriend's computer makes her lose her pictures/music, yeah, she'll be pissed.)  That's all on a FireWire drive and won't get touched until the whole process is over.

Step 2. Switch the drives
At the beginning, the 60 Gig drive was in the external enclosure.  Tiny little thing from Transcend, and easy as pie to switch out the 2.5" SATA from--and no power other than the USB.  For $20, buy it whenever you buy any 2.5" SATA, because it will do nothing but help you.
I took that out.  I also took out the drive from the HP laptop, and then switched the two.  Now the HP laptop has 60GB and the external has 120; the external is technically bootable, but, I've burned an Ubuntu 9.10 CD-RW and am hoping to boot from it.

Step 3. Install Ubuntu on the server laptop.
Running into some problems loading Ubuntu.  If I "Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer"--or, "live-boot" it, I don't know why they don't say that at least somewhere--or if I try to "install Ubuntu" by going straight to the installer, it starts to load, gives me a little bit of splash screen, shakes the disk around, and then goes to black.  The live Ubuntu still lives, and recognizes the power button and starts to shut down, and lets go of the disk tray... but it doesn't get going.  I'd guess the computer's just slow, but, the very audible CD-drive stops spinning, so, likely not.  I checked the disc for defects, and, no dice that the burn was just faulty.
UPDATE:  Nope.  Just slow.  I mean, it's one thing to be slow form a live-boot disk.  But this is ridiculous.  I think it was ten minutes before the GUI showed up.  (HINT: If your Ubuntu install seems like it's not doing anything, it's probably doing something really slowly: try the arrow keys, and the console version of what's going on should pop-up: at least there, you can see that something is happening.)
[ An aside: There are some serious GUI problems running Ubuntu on this HP laptop.  I'm hoping it's just the live CD, but the entire screen flashes almost every time an element is changed.  It's painful just to point your eyeballs at, as a physical effect, let alone as a usable interface.  ]
Problem!  /home can't be on NTFS! The blog post I had been somewhat referring to said you should make an separate partition for your files.  Makes sense (right now, I've got OS X and Ubuntu sharing a home dir on a fourth partition on my Macbook).  But, it also said to make it NTFS--I think they weren't doing anything fancy, just, using the space for sticking files on that could be read by both systems.  I'm looking to make one home directory (at least, not have links from the OS partition to the home partition that might need to be changed later), so, that's not for me.  What's much more for me right now is making it ext4 (maybe 3? I forget now, as the Ubuntu install slideshow runs), and just wiping it later.  ----ext3, I just checked in gparted, since I managed to boot into the live disk instead of just installing it, as I had hoped to.  I went one below 4, because of this Wikipedia article that says that Windows NT could read ext3 with add-ons, but, not ext4. Validity? Uncertain. Willingness to back-up and wipe at this point? Certain.

Step 4. Make Ubuntu work.
This, usually, is not a step.  But man oh man is this laptop... I dunno, it's not old, or anything like that.  Ubuntu installs cleaner on my 2006 MacBook than it does on this 2007 HP thing.  I dunno?  But there's a lot of blinking, and no instant wireless.  So it's in the second bedroom/office, plugged into the router, just to update the 250-some packages that need updating since Karmic Koala was released.
That's done.  But still, a lot doesn't work.  Stupid drivers.

Step 5.  Sleep
Oh god the blinking.  It makes just looking at this screen for five seconds feel like I've stepped out of the past and into the future of 1000 years from now when computers are made of magic.  I think I can feel my head hurting less tomorrow, now.
Apparently, there's a bug in the standard distribution of the... Intel 945 graphics drivers?  That or xserver.  Or... you know, something between the graphics card and the OS and the install disk.  It might help that now I'm installing with the network on and it'll figure out its problems, but, I'm not holding out any serious hope, and, I still have to go through all the rigamarole it took to this this HP craptop to load from the CD in the first place, without just... timing out and having the disk stop spinning, mid gui-loading.  If it's not done in like ten minutes, I'm just going to sleep and trying again in the morning.