Ok, so last weekend I decided to put Linux on my laptop. Many, many thanks to Exile57 for spending 4 1/2 hours on Sunday helping me install it. And many thanks to
obsequity for trying to fix the screen issue and mounting the shared partition.
I'm pretty excited about having Linux on my laptop. Now I can play with it whenever I want. And I can play around with programming in all sorts of languages. I just have to get the JDK and other fun programming tools and I am on my way.