use Perl

As I'm in the process of getting a notebook, I've decided that I no longer need to have windows on my home machine. The main reasons is that all I use this box for is perl hacking, irc, web and email.

I've decided on RedHat 7.3 and burnt all 3 cds at work (beauty of being able to download at 150k/s). My to do list before d-day is:

• Get a new soundcard, I have a Turtle Beach Montego II OEM from Dell, and it seems the chances of it working are minimal. Looks like a $20 Creative Labs PC128 should do the trick or is there a more reliable model about?
• Work out what to do about hard disk situation. This machine only has space for 2 disks (since I put a cd-writer in). Both are 20 gig, one is full of MP3s the other half full. Been considering some kind of external USB kit so I can take it back and forth to work. They claim 900k/s which is more than fast enough for MP3s. No idea if they will work in Linux though. Buy shiny new 40 gig disk.
• Never used a cd-writer in Linux. Worry for a second that it won't work. Realise that you haven't used it in months anyway.
• Feel glad that you paid the extra money for a DSL Router/Firewall so you can use DHCP and not have to worry that RedHat will try to sneak in as many services as possible :)
• Go and find out where to get PC100 memory and upgrade to 256mb. Prepare to marvel at how cheap the stuff is

I've been contemplating wussing out and installing Win2k just because I know it will work, but that does seem the cowardly way out...