I have fedora 7 installed as a virtual OS in my home PC, and it's a great tool for my daily job and its Unix capabilities; I'm currently posting from fedora's firefox.
My base OS is Win XP SP2. I have installed two great freeware utilities WinSCP and Putty on my Win XP, and through them I can access my fedora, ubuntu, BSD from Win XP.
Also, you can install it or other major flavors of Linux (Ubuntu, Suse, BSD...) on your work laptop as a virtual OS, (on top of your Win XP, if you're allowed though
).
Quote:
Want to keep my hand in the UX OS (or some flavor)...
...So you got options...
Good luck