It's a Microsoft shop, but I got away with it (at least I think I did) because a plausible business reason for it fell into my lap.

I need to investigate software components for use in an embedded system.
They thought they'd need NT to run this stuff. So they were bracing themselves for having to pay for Embedded NT licenses, in addition to the licenses for the component itself. I started looking into alternatives, and found indications that it can be done on Linux.

My supervisor is a hardware guy, so he has no ideology w.r.t. software. The IS guy knows about it, but he doesn't seem bothered by it.

So I had an excuse to install Linux, on two machines. Dual boot, of course. I'm having fun. I installed Mandrake 6.1 on a creaky old P120, no problems. Then I decided to push my luck, and stretch my business case to the breaking point, by making my regular work PC dual boot as well. I rationalized that by telling myself and others that I might eventually need a full blown development system, which the lesser machine could never aspire to be. Never know if I'll have to evaluate some open source stuff that doesn't come in binary form.

Had a major hassle with Intel onboard video until I found some less outdated Linux ROMs, and that magically went away. Yes, you actually need a kernel module to talk to an 810e AGP video adapter, and that's only the beginning. I was ready to compile it from source and go through all that other rigmarole in the README, but trying the newer disk saved me.

I'm also playing with a very recent build of WINE, to see if it can be of use. I'm not terribly impressed with it. It runs Solitarie and Calc just fine, but try a halfway serious program and it chokes.

Say, whatever happened to those Infomagic CDROM packages that had all the latest copies of all the major distros? I really miss those. I didn't want to go Cheapbytes `coz I didn't want to wait for mail order.