|
I would recommend going with Ubuntu, which is a Debian derived flavor of Linux. If you are learning Linux at all, it will likely be primarily command line based.
Fair warning, once you use a proper OS with a unix like shell, you'll find Windows much less powerful.
There is a great screencast from Peepcode covering the basics of the command line and how the directory structures work. Understanding how the systems are structured will help make sure that you can safely update the OS without interfering with the code that you've either compiled or written yourself.
Another cool resource is command line fu for really cool shortcuts and commands that will make your life easier (sudo !! is my favorite).
Also since you're running in VMWare, remember that snapshots are nice, but not a substitute for backups.
While the package manager in Ubuntu is nice, you also ought to try to compile some of software on your own. I always compile nmap from scratch. You also might try Alpine, which can be configured as an imap client to connect to gmail of all things.
Personally I've used Slackware and numerous versions of Ubuntu. GUIs for Linux kind of suck, but if you've used Windows you're used to that. I run the latest long term support version of Ubuntu in a VM for some server based stuff and use Back|Track when I need weapons. It's also Ubuntu based.
|