A couple other remarks, just to maybe help you look in other directions, too.

If you're comfortable with scripting languages and databases, there's a whole web business world full of incompetent people to impress. I don't think it would be very gratifying in the long run, but this is one of the areas where you don't necessarily need to be strong on C / systems programming, which is often otherwise a baseline requirement for Unix-y jobs. Personally I would not touch PHP, but of course, that's where a lot of the buzz is right now. Ruby on Rails might be more interesting, but I'm not too familiar with that.

And of course, there's a lot of "real" development shops doing real products on Linux or Unix. The ones I've been looking at tend to work on Internet appliances and stuff like that, where probably systems programming is an important skill, too; but in actual practice, from what I've heard, some of these shops mainly use Python in practice. (I guess Google, too?)