sit back

• get yourself a good book about linux: mine was this, but it can also be this one
• Keep away from any computer,
• read it through. Enjoy!!!
• Once you're done with it, go for debian, spend a few days installing
• spend some weeks making all your hardware be seen
• learn , learn, learn
• you're done!!!

I honestly think this is the best way. I've seen many go for "ubuntu" but you don't pass a certain level in which you can do nothing outside ubuntu, and you can barely get by within it.

http://zareason.com/shop/home.php

Just when I had bought a new lenovo with windows 7 on it.

PS: I'm not a spam machine.

I've been working from cuba for a spanish company for almost a decade now. we also have had people working on india and buenos aires.

    - phone is overrated, keep always in touch with im
    - use trac or similar ticketing software for all your projects
        - always reflect in your tickets discussions relative to how to solve a problem, never let the only reference to a task be in just an email or a chat log.
        - keep tickets simple and small.
        - somebody on the team has to spend time reading tickets and prioritizing them
    - use git or svn
    - tests

I know you weren't looking for an answer like this. but what can I say?. I pass most of my day sitting in front of a computer, I also have a tendency to be slightly overweighted .
I read about Montignac Diet, found the book, downloaded it, read it, got convinced by it, tried it, and now I'm a fanatic. (in the good sense). it worked. actually It's more a change of food habit than a diet "per se".
anyway, enough with the spam. good luck with whatever you decide.

I've been living in cuba for the last 6 years. I've been using linux since the slackware 100 diskettes era (about 12 years ago).

• cuba is absolutely windows friendly. everybody in everywhere uses windows. The goverment itself announced a few years ago it was going to migrate to linux. So far nothing yet.
• cuba works around the embargo thing by means of massive pirate copies (I'm perfectly OK with that).
• it's a usual thing to announce something with great fireworks that ends up in nothing, so I would have not so many expectations on this .

All this buzz about creationism, faith and evolutionism is very hard to understand for me .
I'm spanish, I've hold to a very very strong or hard line or -whatever you want to call it- believing system (also known as "faith").
Neither me or anybody I would meet in my entire life , wherever is in spain or cuba or any other country (mostly european) I've been into had any kind of the slightlest "issue" about evolutionism versus creationism.
Everybody takes darwing ok, and we look at that "US controversy" as something funny and hard to understand
Besides that, I wonder if that "previous" change that was needed can somehow be needed to a "special event" on the environment.