Restrictive Environment From School

[nukem]

Our school district is very closeminded about what students should be allowed to do on their computers. While they have given every student a laptop we are not allowed to do anything with them. We run in a very restricted mode were only certain apps are allowed to be run such as IE, Office, and a few other school related programs, we can not use any standard windows programs such as Explorer(for files) or the Start Menu(we use some Novell program we call "the box" to launch our programs), a school administrator has to approve and install hardware we can not do it ourselves, programs is another questionable thing since they do not allow anything to be installed without approval and think everything needs a site licence including open source software. Comming from a long Linux programming background I think there is no way our programming team will be able to do anything other then basic control in this sort of environment.

Before I goto the school and tell them this there are a couple things I am wondering. First of all does anything programming wise require to be running in administrative mode? Because everyone on the programming team runs Linux at home and are thus alot better at using a Linux environment how should I approch the school about dual-booting with Linux and which distro(we all use Gentoo)? How would you approch the school about this?

Thanks

nuke