Some of those are old systems now. I think the easiest way at first is to stay with Ubuntu as a linux distribution because of the big community, supported applications and documentation. It is an awesome Operating-System. I am really glad that I was a source of inspiration.

Oh, I remembered that you asked me at one point about where to learn Javascript. Here are 2 cool sites to do that, in case you haven't already found them: Eloquent Javascript and Codecademy