You had just did a weekly install of some OS which did not detected Linux, Follow the steps mentioned below to get GRUB working again. Please note this would erase the current bootloader and install a new one for you if you are unsure of what you are doing do not try this

1. Boot from a Linux Live CD ( ex ubuntu or knopix, i use Ubuntu)
2. Open the terminal
3. Follow the commands mentioned below

• sudo grub

if sudo doesnot works switch to root user and use grub drectly, Find the ROOT device you will get the values for X & Y which will be used later.

• grub> find /boot/grub/stage1

Set the root device from the information achieved from the above command

• grub> root (hdX,Y)

Install GRUB

• grub> setup (hd0)

Exit GRUB

Skype is not available in the default configured repositories of Ubuntu so an alternate is downloading a deb package from skype and installing it but as i am an apt-get fan i would recommend adding the repositories listed below and then using

# sudo apt-get install skype

But you need to Add a Repository using the commands below before using apt-get if there is no command listed for your distro goto Medibuntu

• Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope"

wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

• Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex"

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d medibuntu.list

Installing majority of softwares on Ubutu is just a like away same is the case with PostgreSQL

Installing PostgreSQL (8.3)

$ sudo apt-get install postgresql

Setting the password for the postgres user

$ sudo -u postgres psql template1

ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD 'password-u-need';
\q

this installs and configues the password for the postgreSQL

is this not easy with ubuntu

and yes if you need to use postgreSQL with PHP on your apache server the install the php5-pgsql module using the following

$ sudo apt-get install php5-pgsql