[Wlug] PC-BSD, FreeBSD, and iXsystems - anyone know about them?

I have pretensions of hacker status someday. ;-] They are selling a desktop with PC-BSD installed and configured. I'm thinking about buying their new Apollo rig, http://www.ixsystems.com/apollo and ask them to install some kind of virtual machine software on top of FreeBSD (or PC-BSD) so that I can learn various linux distros running as clients. Anyone know anything about them? Any thoughts or cautions about this approach? Thanks in advance for thoughts, reactions. PS - anyone programming Lisp, write me? Brian.McLinden@gmail.com