The Red Hat cert will pay off.As I speak my company is porting everything over(our remote servers that is) to redhat from sco unix.I'm working on my B.A in IT and they hire some kid just out of high school with nothing but a redhat cert and give him a job in our programing dept. I wanted to transfer over there from tech support but they hired him. The kid doesn't have ANY experiance mind you...just a cert. If you can afford the 2500-3000 bucks go for redhat.
Linux+ is a joke.