Like others mention, use a virtual machine like VirtualBox, and give everyone a virtual machine of your Linux system in addition to instructions to set up their own. This will save countless hours of helping your students get up and running.

To your question, what distro? I'd recommend Centos, which is a free as in beer version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and/or Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL). The only real differences between the three is branding and the support contract, with a five year support plan. Both Red Hat and Oracle have a Linux certification test, if you are looking to have a 'real' certificate when they are done.

Oracle supports Linux - RHEL and Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) are more or less the same, with the support contracts run through Oracle rather than the Red Hat folks. Works nice when the OS and the application are one company - eliminates finger pointing. The support for Linux is very strong and from what I understand, they are all in (much like IBM is).

I don't understand why Oracle would want to make that same sort of commitment to another OOS operating system, especially one that has such a little footprint. Heck, I'd be a bit worried about Solaris proper, much less the OOS variant, were there a better SPARC option on the Linux side.

The Russians take a pretty sound strategy when it comes to rockets. The 'people' rated rockets are smaller and the heavy lifters don't go through the same qualification needed to ship humans. You send up the crew on one set of rockets and the materials on another. Assemble in orbit and save a good bit of money.

The shuttle is/was a 'people' rated heavy lifter. I suspect it got used for more political reasons than practical.

The Sun (now Oracle?) Java developer's certificate does show a fair bit of proficiency with the language. You really do need to have more than just a passing familiarity to get it. For me, one of the most challenging parts was things that were technically legal (and would work), but were very far from anything I would call best practice. The second bit was the breadth of the API it covers. I've been doing server side Java since servlets were born, with a heavy concentration the application server/EE side of the fence. Once I experimented with a client side application, so had to spend some time brushing up on little used (in my dev work) libs like Swing, AWT, etc.

Anyhow... this cert was real work. Short of many years under your belt, this really will make a difference at interview time - be it already knowing the same sort of snarky Java questions, or just getting a pass on the language.

For those not familiar with the brand, Oppo is one of the top consumer grade players out there. when I wash shopping for an up scaling DVD player, it was consistently one of the better recommendations on the AV forums and friends who did some serious (but not stupid) home setups. I love mine. In the case of several movies, it seems to skip the FBI warning - bonus!

If you were to 'hide' any consumer grade stuff into what is positioned as l33t/your left arm hardware, an Oppo would have been my first guess.

I did not try baking anything, but it did turn the top of the computer into a nice coffee cup warmer.

I've got a pair of 9800gx2 in my rig. The cards turn room temperature air into ~46C air. Without proper ventilation, these things will turn a chassis into an easy bake oven.

For those not familiar with the 9800gx2 cards, it essentially is two 8800gts video cards linked together to act as a single card - something called SLI on the NVidia side of marketing. SLI typically required a mainboard/chipset that would allow you to plug in two cards and link them together. This model allowed any mainboard to have two 'internal' cards linked together, with the option of linking another 9800gx2 if your board actually supported SLI.

The pictures did not show any SLI bridge, so it looks like they are just taking advantage of multiple GPUs per card.

I've got one of these running my local subversion repositories and a few other processes. As a bonus, it is fanless. One gotcha is it is a i586 CPU, which means distros like Centos and a few others will not install without a bit of extra work.

That is terrible news.

Surprised at the XP64 hating out there. When it was first released, drivers were in rough shape. Today, I've found most of the motherboards and video cards I buy have Server 2003/XP64 support - that covers 99% of the drivers I normally bump into. Heck, I even got my laptop running XP64. That was a bit of a treasure hunt compared to the typical build, but still.

Anyhow, had a different point to bring up... There are a few games and apps that don't - but for the most part it just works. For those that don't, many cases it is just a brain dead installer. (Hey Apple iTunes developers, I'm looking at you!) Turns out you can fix an installer where the people did not think to test/support XP64 by modifying the MSI installer to not rule out a properly patched version of XP64.

Download Microsoft's Orca MSI editor. (Find it in this CAB, or google for it) Look for a "LaunchCondition" property, probably set to "VersionNT64>=600" and modify it to "VersionNT64>=501". Shazam! Very good chance it will just work - at least the installer will not stop you from trying to run it.

Some people (Apple) still need to update drivers, etc... but more often then not it works.
   

On the Office front, I've got a G4 (Mac) laptop with Microsoft Office. Power Point still runs on a PowerPC CPU.