Laptop related issues

[Chuck Campbell]

I'm considering a laptop, and I've been doing research on what works and
what doesn't.  As far as I can tell, there is no easy way to do this, other
than;

 1)Buy what someone else has, and follow their steps for making it all work.
 2)Buy what ever you want, and work on making it all work (this means living
   with parts that do NOT work).

Given all of that, and not asking what to buy, I still have a couple of 
questions :

 1)I need to connect to switches, raid boxes, etc. using a serial port.
   Will usb ports work for this (few new laptops w/ serial ports) using
   a converter cable?  If so, what terminal emulation s/w under Linux
   will talk over the usb port to these kinds of devices?  Put another
   way, can a usb port be configured and talked to as com[1-4]?

 2)Are there any issues w/ RH9 and/or FC-1 and XFree86 on WUXGA displays?
   Is this really a function of XFree86 and/or graphics drivers? 

 3)Anyone have any experience running RH9 / FC-1 as a base OS, and using
   VMWare to host a WinXP pro OS as well?  Does VMWare run happily on the 
   RH9 / FC-1 host OS?

thanks,
-chuck