Late night

Well, its 1:30am and my day is about to end. This morning I woke up to a 1GB ram card on the desk. Looks like my dad was looking out for me again. I plugged it in and it ran fine.

Also, I decided I'm going to make a holding bracket for my hard drive, as its only a small laptop drive. Currently, its just sitting inside the computer where the hard drive would normally be screwed in. I plan on moving it safely when I can.

For my bracket, I decided it would be easiest to use a case from an old 1GB hard drive. I gutted everything out, and now I just have to figure out how I'm going to mount the hard drive inside it.

I also installed Sun's VirtualBox and attempted to install openSUSE, but I gave up after a couple tries. I did manage to play with it using the liveCD. Now I'm installing ArchLinux, which I think is much more fun. I have much more control over everything, and I'm learning with a nice learning curve. I also had some help from the OCNix guys.
Right now its installing the GUI, after about 3 hours of installing everything else. I think once I work with this a little more, I can scratch off a goal from my list. Installing linux really isn't difficult, especially if your running it through an app like VirtualBox. I would imagine installing on the actual hard drive wouldn't be any more difficult.

The installation process is all text based and has a custom boot loader. A GUI isn't preinstalled with arch linux, making it much more flexible if you choose to work solely from the terminal. If you choose to install a GUI, which most people do, you can choose from any GUI that is available in the package manager, including both KDE and Gnome.

The guys at arch linux put together a nice beginners guide to installing and running arch linux. It's almost exactly like unix code, and comes with python language preinstalled.
The link to the guide can be found Here.