Ubuntu Dell precision 380 w/ dual monitors

I've tried various different linux distro's and some failed on install, some installed, but only partially worked "out of the box". I am under the mind set that for servers you go Redahat (or centos.. more on that later), and for desktops you go Ubuntu. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was easier to get setup then I orginally though. I dual boot at the bios level to one hard drive or another. I have a scsi card and scsi drive with Windows XP on it. I now have a SATA drive (and onboard controller that came with me Dell) with Ubuntu on it. At boot I push F12 and select which drive I want to boot into. By default it goes to Windows for the sake of other household members, but I try to keep it in Ubuntu (maybe someday soon I can change the default).

Now for the install of ubuntu here's the tricks I had to use:
1) Shutdown pc ->remove scsi card and to be safe remove power to scsi drive
2) boot pc with F12 option to boot from cd rom with the ubuntu install cd in the cd drive
3) Go through the install wizad following the directions (when it get's to formatting the partion it may "hang" at 5% for a long time.. don't woory, it's still working and not hung)
4) Now, provided the install went well as it did for me, you've rebooted and logged in with the username and password you set during install. Now you shoudl see a popup for software updates... apply them (this will take some time as it downloads and installs them. I've got a pretty quick system and it seemed to almost have hung during the update of the update manager (funny to thik it uses itself to update itself.. pretty cool)
5) reboot again and login again. At this point I had two issues. Dual monitors don't work (only 1), and I liek to autologin for ease of use for my house. Autologin was easy enough. System->Administration->Login Window. This took an unusually long time to come up after the password prompt, but it did eventually open and opens much quicker after the first time (don't know why there is such a delay the first time it's loaded)
6) Dual monitors... this can be tough for many linux installs (for non-linux gurus like myself). Now you may have scene another popup near the software updates popup talking about hardware drivers. If not go System->Administration->Hardware Drivers. I had to enable and install "Nvidia accelerated graphics driver (latest cards). This is installing the Nvidia drivers rather then the ones that come with Ubuntu.. there is mix feelings on this.. but it's how I got my system to work.. so I'm happy. After install reboot if it asks too.
7) The last thing I had to do was edit the config file for Xserver. I read that I should have been able to call a GUI util installed by nvidia, but for whatever reason I don't have it.. o it doesn't work. So I ran this in a terminal session.
su (then enter password)
gedit etc/X11/xorg.conf
(this brings up a text editor and I needed to edit the "devices" section:
it looked like this when I opened it:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

and like this when I saved and closed it:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
Option "TwinView" "True"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "True"
Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1280x1024; 1024x768,1024x768"
Option "UseDisplayDevice" "DFP"
EndSection

I have dual flat panel displays (lucky me ;)).. you config may vary, but hopefully you too can get dual monitors and dual boot setup ... I for one don't want to go to vista.. so it's either run XP forever or start looking into alternatives