I can vouch for strawberry perl as well.  Works pretty well on a variety of windows machines.  We have a lot of existing perl scripts here and I've gotten so used to maintaining them I actually default to perl for a lot of stuff.

If you wanted to just experiment with some linux software, you could use a live cd / usb distribution as well. That's probably not worth the pain when it comes to programming and needing various libraries and the like though.  Maybe the usb live distributions, I haven't played with those as much. I got spoiled as my access to VM technology got drastically better during the transition between distros doing live cds and live usbs.


Jon Gorman
Library IT
University of Illinois
217 244-4688