1. You'll be well suited and pickup Suse quite easily. It's always been my contention that the hardest part of any distro is getting X working with any kind of hardware acceleration on a given machine. (Of course once you get that working everything else is cake.)

   You'll find differences that may perplex you, but Suse has a very active community with plenty of advice to be given. Although I probably wouldn't start here. Instead I would start with a Google search of a Suse Linux form.

2. you'll be perfectly fine;
   SuSE has added tools & goodies, but has left as much as possible of the basic linux/unix features.
   unless you apply for a job @ a SuSE partner, where everybody walks around with a SuSE certification, any company you start with will give a couple weeks to get familiar with its systems (@ large)
3. suse has some nonstandard apache config files (too automated for my tastes), but it's just your basic linux. you'll do fine
4. Every distro has its own customizations but you should be good to go with the Lunux+ cert at least for an entry-level position. Good luck!

Tags: linux laptop, red hat linux 9