That is a lot of questions within 2 paragraphs.. hehe

Google and wikipedia would be your best place to start reading, paste all those questions into google ...

Do tell us what programming language you wanted to learn ?

Open Source ,just download the source codes, read it, try to understand what the code does, read it again... and modify it to your liking, if they are useful to the rest of the community, do contribute your codes / modules / plugins back ...

I've used different types of unix : linux, aix, digital unix, solaris and now mac ox (Darwin) as my laptop.. once u know unix, all those variant should be quite similar... just learn the differences.. but the unix concept is still the same same..

Hehe, I am curious why you said that...

I use ubuntu too ... but for non-GUI I use debian...

But lately I read news saying that ubuntu (or the company behind it) is not contributing back to the open source community....

Anyway, let not go into a "my linux distribution is better than yr linux distribution" debate...

I've been using Linux for such a long time and was totally not aware of this matter...

During the 2009 FOSS.MY, a very famous person in the free and open source community, Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU ( GNU Not Unix / http://www.gnu.org/ ) explains clearly about this...

Linux should be called GNU/Linux instead of just Linux to give the credit to all the other contributors components in the operating system ( vi, cat, more, man, Xfree, gcc... )..

This is a bit of history of GNU/Linux for those that are interested...

I always finds it funny a lot of ppl pronounce it as "lee-nix" instead of "lee nucks.."

then again the American as "Lye" "Nucks"..

But nowdays, it all about branding branding, no more linux..... Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, Centos, Redhat, Suse....

I m a CLI person as most of my linux are on embedded board like Soekris board access via ssh..

My GUI is Mac OSX / Aqua interface .. best of both world.. unix based OS and nice mac interface..