Installing on secure machine

[DisruptiveTechnology]

Our crappy system support forces us to use red-hat. Yuck, its so outdated and prone to failure. They will not give me root access and I cannot get the machine to boot a CD as I cannot get into the bios to change the boot order to boot off an Ubuntu CD. Is there anyway I can get the machine to install ubuntu as a dual boot or wipe RH?

Trying to do SW development without root...so much for academic freedom.

[CharlesA]

It's their machine and their system. Don't screw with it.

There is really no way you can install Ubuntu on that machine.

[DisruptiveTechnology]

Hmmm

I was thinking of removing the hard-drive and inserting one of mine....but perhaps over kill. Still I have passionate dislike of RH.

[CharlesA]

I would suggest talk to the IT people and see if you can get approval to run a different OS. If their whole network uses Redhat, I doubt that'll be possible.

[dabl]

If they would install the free VMware Player (Ver. 3.x), then you could install whatever OS you wanted on a VM, and they could be sure you wouldn't trash their RH OS or the hardware underneath. But it still requires root to install VMware, so there you go.