I certainly can recommend Ubuntu based on my experience. It has worked on virtually every bit of hardware that I've tried it on. You could always run it under

I certainly can recommend Ubuntu based on my experience. It has worked on virtually every bit of hardware that I've tried it on. You could always run it under VmWare if you want to retain your Windows environment. You might want to consider CygWin as a way of doing *nix on top of Windows. But beware, C/C++ programming under CygWin has some incompatability issues.