Considering installing Ubuntu on your machine?! My experience is that it is very easy to do so and a great operating system for the kind of stuff I want to be doing. Moreover, every 6 months or so a new version comes out to which you can easily upgrade. There is a huge community out there using Ubuntu so help is never far away. The great thing is that you can ‘try it out’ with a Live-cd which sets up Ubuntu on your machine if you boot up with it. This allows you to see whether you like it, whether your hardware is supported, etc. By clicking on the install icon on the desktop you can then decide whether you want to install it as your main OS or alongside Windows for example. There are many online (video) tutorials out there which tell you how to install Ubuntu, including various OpenSource GIS tools. A great site is Aaron Racicot’s Reprojected blog. On the Video link you can find various videos demonstrating (+ written out) how to install Ubuntu, base GIS tools, PostgreSQL/PostGIS and QGIS including Python bindings which allow you to create stand alone applications.