I'm in the same boat as you, let's hope we get out of 'newbie jaill' fairly soon
Edit:
After reading the
NEWBIE README it would seem my original post couldn't possibly be construed as substantial, hence this edit.
I've explored bitcoins for approximately 15 months now (although BFL didn't ship my Jalapeno until ~4 months ago even though it was estimated to ship late November 2012, but that's a different story...).
My current mining setup is still ye olde Jalapeno attached to a netbook running Ubuntu and bfgminer which does a nice job. Originally I had the ASIC being controlled by a RaspberryPi and
MinePeon but the Pi died on me which I didn't notice for almost a month but hey, what can you do? BFGminer isn't quite as user friendly as MinePeon but it does the job, screen for the win!