<p>As a Linux user of several years, I have a bit of advice: don’t use RHEL.</p>
<p>The only reason to use RHEL is for the support and enterprise backend that’s provided, but other than that, it’s just a nightmare in terms of having the latest features, being up to date, customization, etc.</p>
<p>Your laptop is for your own use, and in your case, RHEL does not really provide anything that Ubuntu doesn’t provide. Meanwhile, Ubuntu is easier to use, has a much nicer packaging system, is really fine-tuned, and updated. If you really want familiarity, I suggest you at least run Fedora, which is a more regular distro in which RHEL gets its components from. The problem is, stuff doesn’t tend to get incorporated in RHEL until it’s almost three years old!</p>
<p>As for Virtualization - Microsoft VirtualPC is awful at anything but Windows. I recommend you check out VMWare Server and/or Sun VirtualBox as alternatives. Both are free for personal use. Also, you since you have a host operating system, you really should be using one OS as the host and running the other in the VM. If you run both OSes in the VM, you’re getting the worst of both worlds.</p>
<p>Since I’m comfortable with Linux, I run Arch Linux as my host OS and have Windows XP SP3 in a virtual machine. However, I also have Vista on dual boot just in case I feel like doing some gaming.</p>