dicetumbler

Hey, everyone. Was hoping I could get some insight on this. I've bought myself an eeepc with XP preinstalled. What I'd like to do is to have a very slimmed-down, nlited XP, so I can put a linux distro on top of it. The thing is, my resources are somewhat limited. The eeepc doesen't come with an optical drive, so I'd like to do this without having a boot CD, and instead use my usb hard drive. Here's what I have: the eeepc, an ubuntu desktop with a CD-RW/DVD drive, and a usb external hard drive, the recovery DVD that was bundled with the eeepc, and an XP product key that's stickered to my eeepc. I also found this link http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en, which I think could be used? I was told that the recovery disk wouldn't have the actual Windows file, but there's folders marked ... in addition to drivers and software. I also have access to another pc with windows and a CD drive, but I'd like to see if I can avoid using it, since I'm trying to make my life as difficult as possible. So is this at all theoretically possible? Where do I even start? This is probably way out of my league, skillz-wise, but it would be so sweet if I could get this to work, particularly since I imagine there's other users out there in a similar situation.