I'm amazed that no one has yet mentioned XNA Game Studio, available for free for all students (www.dreamspark.com). It might be at first intimidating for a newbie programmer, since it provides a full IDE interface, but there are a good number of walkthrough tutorials allowing you to make a game of Pong in a short time, and a 3D space blaster type game in a bit more. It's also compatible with the Xbox 360, so if he has one he could create simple games to play on that. It's probably a bit more attention grabbing for the son than the old BASIC code that most people seem to be reccomending...

That would be a good idea. Perhaps even just a pop-up bubble saying "start here". As to all the replies about mp3 support, Ubuntu's philosophy is such that it doesn't natively install ANYTHING proprietary (ie MP3s). It IS simple to install the relevant codecs when you run RhythmBox, but the average Windows user who's trying to start Ubuntu will wonder why the hell it doesn't ship with it. Dell could have shipped its computers with Mint Linux, which has all these pre-installed, but they're a much less "major" linux distro (based on Ubuntu in fact). Another thing I love about Ubuntu (and Linux in general), is Compiz - why pay for Vista Ultimate/Mega/Uber edition (whatever they call it) for the "Aero Experience", when Compiz/Beryl can do it all for free, on less memory... Sorry for that last bit - perhaps a bit of trolling there - but anyone that doesn't mind a bit of searching on forums and google for solutions to hardware problems (which Ubuntu DOES have - wireless is notoriously tricky to get working) should really try it. It knocks the socks of Windows once you've played a while...