Or perhaps, if you wanna build a lab @ your house to test it, install VMWare. It allow you to install couple of OS as you wish under an OS. It also allow you to do networking (NAT, Bridge) within them.

What i have is just 2 PC, 1 install with Windows(XP, 2K and 2003-3 partition) and have Fedora C2 as my Virtual machine & another is Redhat, along with Windows 2K, + OpenBSD as my virtual machine. So in the mean time, i can have different OS to test out my work.

You can just start with vmware workstation 1st, later get everything on hand and familiar, can try to manage them in vmware server too. Or Virtual PC is another alternative option.

^_^ enjoy learning