Linux will repartition the hard drive during installation and suggest defaults for new (Linux) partitions. You will need /root and /swap as a minimum. I would recommend using a floppy or CD to boot into Linux as Windows doesn't like sharing the boot block and can be hard to boot/recover if you fiddle with it. All this will be sorted easily with an up-to-date distro.
When you've installed Linux, keep your common dox on the windows partition somewhere, so you can access them under both OSs.
As much as I hate to say it, (Linux) UAE is a poor shadow of WinUAE, especially in the setting up/ease of use dept. Speed wise, there isn't much difference (naturally) but UAE is not as far on as WinUAE.
For goodness' sake don't use a hardfile: why write to a huge file unnecessarily? Both UAE and WinUAE will use the respective OS filesystems transparently and there is absolutely no need to compile/implement AFFS in Linux unless you are directly attaching a real Amiga hard drive to the IDE interface (as many have done with their A1s).
Either copy your current Amiga files to CD/Zip etc or network the laptop and Amiga together to transfer your existing setup. For a once-only operation, a parallel connection will do fine.
