Dell 4150/Red Hat Hardware/software compatibility

[DTLeigh aol com]

I intend buying a Dell Inspiron 4150 (Pentium4-M) laptop with 256M memory.
I will run ORACLE 9i database under Linux - can I be sure this hardware will run Red-Hat Linux? 

Rather than any form of co-residence with MS products e.g. dual booting with Win2K or XP, I wish to set up a physical exchangable hard drive for the laptop as100% Linux. Is this feasible/practical also?

Thanks,
New subscriber to Red Hat Linux 
Derek