if they had to make a decision to not give (only) you a terminal session, and then let you do the admin setup and edit the sudoers file, i agree with you.

they would be dumba$$es

seriously though, what they would want is a killer app they can't live without. you have to find out what that is. you will learn something from these dumbasses if you go through that exercise. And don't forget to throw in (a little) eye candy to finish them off. Superkaramba is your friend.

also, have you considered booting the windows machines to knoppix?

would aforementioned dumbasses consider loading vmware player on the windows machines? you can then create vmware disks and load the O/S of the day and have full machine control on a virtual machine. present it as a "learning opportunity".

if they won't, qemu and dsl will let you run your own "poor man's vmware" from a thumbdrive (in user space).

all rites of passage suck, especially school.

good lounge thread