Quartus is available for SUSE and RedHat -- not sure about other distros. (I used the Windows version in the courses I teach.)
My students use the DE1 prototyping kit from Altera -- actually it's made by Terasic in Taiwan. $150 buys you a board with a good-sized set of I/Os, three memory chips, etc.
As I've said here before, I find Quartus (Altera) easier to work with than ISE (Xilinx). Students can drill down in the schematics and see the gate-level structures, which I never figured out how to do using ISE. I'm sure you can do it, it's just that I found it easier when using Quartus.

I've had great experience with PrinceXML -- same document to generate both interactive web page and printable PDF using CSS3 tailored to the media. If you already know HTML/CSS, extending yourself to CSS3 is a lot easier than learning LaTeX.

Celoxica (the company that developed Handel-C) was taken over by Agility (Mentor) half a year ago. Handel-C is great (except for some crufty syntax around the I/O parts), and the DK development environment is good. But I'd be wary of getting involved with it until its future is more certain.

As I just posted in reply to a Handel-C comment above, I've been using Quartus for several semesters now, currently with an inexpensive prototyping board from them. Altera has given great academic support, and we've had none of the problems the parent poster mentions. I do a mix of schematics and Verilog. For example, I'll do the Verlog version of a module, and have the students implement the schematic to replace it in a bigger design. I don't doubt the parent's experience, but as a moral and ethical person, I had to reply ...

I taught a lab course using Handel-C for a few years, and would recomment it highly; I was trying to get computer science students to be able to "think parallel" as one could do only in hardware -- but which is crucial for transitioning software developers into the multi/many core realities. Unfortunately, Celoxica has sold the Handel-C/DK development environment, and it is not clear whether it will actually stay around much longer. So I wouldn't adopt it now.

Xilinx is great, but I now use a $150 prototyping board from Altera in another course, and they provide great academic support for their "Quartus" IDE, which lets the students combine modules developed as schematics, in Verilog, in SystemVerilog, in VHDL, as a state diagram, and/or in AHDL. It seemed easier to me to bring the students up to speed on Quartus compared to Xilinx' "ISE". (Xilinx was the backend for Handel-C, and I just never got used to using the front end, so I'm not really comparing the two, just saying that the toolchain from Altera is good and that there are good inexpensive protoyping boards from them too.)

This specification should be read like all other specifications. First, it should be read cover-to-cover, multiple times. Then, it should be read backwards at least once. Then it should be read by picking random sections from the contents list and following all the cross-references.