Aiiight-


The best places you can put out some effort and really gain experience as well as get your name out and meet some really awesome people to know is to volunteer some time to some of the Open Source projects. Open something up on Sourceforge, ask to help out on one of the *BSD projects (those guys will be a TREMENDOUS resource, they know that OS inside and out), ask to help out at the FSF, start your own project for the FSF, then ask if anyone would like to help you. Sometimes there are things people want to see done, but they do not have the time to put towards it themselves, but they are not against helping someone with the time to do it for them. So, ask if what people would like to see done to what projects (lurk some usenet groups and see what peopel are looking for). You may need to sit and learn some new things, there may be pieces you need to figure out before you could write new kernel modules, etc. In all seriousness, the GNU website usually has a link asking for those that would like to volunteer time or resources to the projects, that's a good place to start as well.
You won't get paid, but you don't seem to be asking to, the people working on these projects are amazing, top-level people (there are also a lot of average geeks on them as well, so don't be scared off), I don't think you could ask for a better place to get into programming and really get some hard-core exp.


Later,

loadc