So there was two lessons. :-)
As I know there is a utility to reverse the rm, but I'm not sure. Theoretically it's possible because the rm does not remove the physical data only the directory entries (like in Windows which uses FAT or NTFS filesystem).
I have had similar lesson once, but with a RAID NAS drive. I had to give the disks to a professional company to restore data (it was the KΓΌrt, a world famous data restoring company - fortunately it is Hungarian and I know them personally).
So IMHO the Debian/Ubuntu based Kubuntu is the right choice π