New month, New Toys

Checking out: Linux
I've been talking about and/or thinking about checking out linux for a long time.
Finally decided to.
My main resource so far has been another wow player that blogs about her hunters, her love of hunters, and how she plays on linux.
The posts that hold the info: http://aspectofthehare.blogspot.com/2008/06/more-wow-on-linux-considering-switch.html
And: http://aspectofthehare.blogspot.com/2007/11/linux-and-wow-q.html
And also: http://aspectofthehare.blogspot.com/2008/03/world-of-warcraft-on-kubuntu-linux.html

So yeah, that's where the geekdom got its initial push this year.
The deciding moment came about, however, because Casey is building a new comp for herself.
The story:
I'd decided I was going to follow the directions in the 'considering switch' post above, download the iso, burn it to a disc and just startup my comp with Ubuntu to see how it looks.
I did, I played around with it, and I set aside the disc when I was done with no real intention of even trying anything else with it.
Looked neat, ran ok, w/e. Right?
And Den....
So, Casey's comp is assembled, all new motherboard, ram, dvd drive, case, graphics card, processor, only thing being pulled from the old box was: the hard drives. 2 of them, IDE drives.
Go to install windows (vista) and blammo, 2 nights of frustration and crap trying to get this damn OS to work. Long story short, no vista as it has problems w/ IDE drives. Fine, we order a SATA drive. In the interim, we load ubuntu on her system and play around with it, trying to get WoW going. If I hadn't been as tired as I was, nor had my week been as long as it had been, I think I would have enjoyed helping Casey with this much much more. I was just too tired and frustrated, and it was too late in the evening. And for that, I apologize. =(
Today, however, I have had some time to look around, and I found a good linux tutorial/classroom resource at, of all places (duh), the linux website: http://www.linux.org/lessons/
Also, once we get the new Drive in, and copy all the stuff off the old drives, they go back into the old comp, and it becomes a linux box!!! I'm going to check out some different distros, try and figure out the basic command structures, etc... and see if I can get more games in a useable state through linux with programs like this 'wine' deal that Pike suggests we run WoW with.
So yeah, excited, geeky, letting my Nerd Flag fly.
And damn proud of it!