If you’re interested in Open Source GIS and especially QGIS, I highly suggest you give the blog “ Under Dark” a read - the author seems to be very clued in the latest developments, and the blog is very active.
I was talking to some friends at school tonight, and I realized what a barrier it can be to actually get some of the open-source geospatial tools I’ve talked about on this blog going.
**Update 2012-02-02 17:57 -0800:I just wrote a post about another way to do this.
I really like QGIS. It’s a powerful GIS that runs on Linux (among other operating systems) and doesn’t require incredible amounts of CPU.