I'm sorry. Use what? An HP Pavillion?
Basically, it's just an X86-based PC, right? So yes, you can run Solaris, Linux, DOS, some versions of Windows (depending upon your machine's resources), or one of the BSDs.
I no longer recommend that anyone setup dual boot on machines anymore. The main reason? Because you can only run one or the other operating system, and do not have access (for the most part) to the programs of the other installed operating system until you shutdown and boot to that other OS.
Instead, I recommend that people use VirtualBox or KVM, create virtual machines and install additional operating systems that way - so as to be able to take advantage and run both (or more) operating systems simultaneously.
You can start/stop/pause, and snapshot iterations of your various running operating systems in time. In fact, pausing an operating system ensures that there is no boot time the next time you want to use it, and when you unpause that OS it begins execution at the next line of code, oblivious to the fact that it may have been paused for several months.
One problem with that. When you unpause an OS, it may become a bit confused when it discovers that, as far as it is concerned, the system date and time has changed dramatically in the space of what it thinks is a nanosecond. To fix this, one would simply open a terminal in most Unices and do the following:
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joeuser@mybox:~$ su -
root@mybox:~# date
Thu Jan 17 04:43:04 PST 2013
root@myboxr:~# ntpdate ntp.ucsd.edu
17 Jan 04:45:19 ntpdate[23191]: step time server 132.239.1.6 offset 125.277730 sec
root@mybox:~# date
Thu Jan 17 04:45:25 PST 2013
Depending upon your system's resources (The amount of RAM is the most critical consideration), you can be running two, three, or four operating systems simultaneously w/o issue. On an older Pavillion running say, Windows XP, you should be able to effectively run a Linux guest OS simultaneously that has been allocated, for example, 512MBytes RAM, when the physically installed memory in your machine has 2GBytes RAM - without issue.
Of course, YMMV, and you may receive cautionary notes not to allocate more than half of your RAM to the virtual machines. If you do, you may see bizzare, or slugglish behaviour.
I hope that helps

Kindest regards,
.