Evan:Welcome! Glad you found your way to us. I think you'll enjoy your experience. I love Plan 9 overall, but it's a particularly interesting spot for people interested in concurrent programming (among a few others); the model found here is very different from what's common in the industry today (and I believe ours is simultaneously simpler and more powerful).
To get started with Plan 9 on Ubuntu, I'd recommend qemu. The install works fine from the ISO you can download from the official site. There are also pre-built qemu images in various places, for example the 9gridchan folks[2], although bits of that are "non-standard". There are other options, but qemu will give you the best simulation of being on real hardware. In particular, avoid VirtualBox; we've seen uniformly poor results.
A quick note on languages: we're a bit "unusual" here. Pretty much everything in the system is written either in C or rc (our shell), with tiny bits of assembler in the platform-specific bits of the kernel. We've got no C++, Python, &c in the system (there is a python and a few other things available as contributed packages, though). There's plenty of interesting things to do with other languages (9P implementations exist for a several), but there's none of them in the core system itself.
Plan 9 C will be very familiar to anyone with ANSI/POSIX C experience. There's a bunch of specific differences, but the overall model is the same (just cleaner, smaller, and more consistent). Limbo's an entirely new language, but personally I think it's wonderful (my favorite). If you're up for a new language, I'd highly recommend it. It's also worth noting that Inferno's designed to run on top of other another OS (in addition to running on raw hardware) with no VM needed, simplifying your introduction somewhat.
We've got a bunch of other good resources, although we're still getting things in good shape for the rush of GSoC-driven newcomers. The wiki[3] is a good place to start. Stop by #plan9 on freenode; there's lots of good folks in there. Until we have things organized a bit better (this week!), you might also poke around our GSoC site from last year; start with the FAQ[4].
Anthony Sorace Strand 1 [1] http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/download.html [2] http://www.9gridchan.org/9grid_node_img [3] http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/plan_9_wiki/ [4] http://gsoc.cat-v.org/FAQ
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