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Live cd
I would recommend Ubuntu; it's extremely friendly towards beginners and is simple to get setup with an IDE. Code::Blocks is an extremely simple IDE that looks and feels a lot like dev-cpp, and should run on most any *nix platform. The only way to find what you're really going to be comfortable with is to try a few live cd's and see what you like best.
If you decide to go with Ubuntu you're going to need the build-essential packages and (you can just use gcc if you dont care for an IDE) Code::Blocks. You can get Code::Blocks from the synaptic package handler and for the build:
markupsudo apt-get install build-essential
HAHA, now I can subject others to my evil ways.