It’s been slightly more than 2 weeks since I installed Ubuntu and I am happy to report that everything is well, Eclipse and all other programs feel more snappy, multiple desktops make life so much easier and a general overall increase in productivity. I also got Oracle instant client installed and working with Rails. Here are some links that will help you if you want to do the same.
- http://ruby-oci8.rubyforge.org/en/InstallForInstantClient.html
- http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/HowtoConnectToOracle
Unfortunately you have no other choice but to set up the LD_LIBRARY_PATH for oracle to work, but on the bright side you can reduce the number of entries you put into it by making symlinks to the oracle dynamic libraries in /usr/lib directory. Also found out that the case matters when you set up the TNS_ADMIN variable (lower case will not work, weird!)
That said, the only reason why I ever go to my windows partition is to use iTunes, I wonder why Apple has not released iTunes for Linux ? I also wish Google talk was available for Linux, Gaim is pretty good but I miss how talk would remember the conversation history.
Devender's Musings 
Pidgin (previously Gaim) does remember the conversation history. To enable that, go to Tools > Preferences > Logging tab and select what you want to save.
You can also go to Tools > Plugins and select the History plugin to show recent messages in the conversation window.
I’ve read that the Pidgin team has plans to enable audio and video chats by version 3.0.