Linux for a programmer's desktop

>Although, the horses usually just watch 
>short clips of the latest races...

It's amazing the audience share that NASCAR garners.  I must say that I'm happy 
to hear that we have lives outside of work.  I have two teens, an infant and a 
menagerie.  Time is a precious commodity indeed, which leads me to a more 
topical question:

I want to learn more about Linux.  By far, the easiest way would be to run it 
here at work.  In fact, I have a hand-assembled jumble running on a 486 here in 
my cube, but it's ancient and command-line only.  I'd rather use X on my 
desktop.  There are several gotcha's that I'd like to overcome.  The first is 
that I'd be all alone - the IT folks will be unable to offer any assistance, 
and will be somewhat apprehensive about me ditching Windows.  Also, everyone 
else will still be running Windows.  Dual boot might help in that regard.  IT 
are running Exchange for our email/calendar and Office is installed on every 
desktop.  I'm a dyed in the wool Code/400 user.

I can investigate the interoperability of OpenOffice.org with Office, and 
perhaps be able to continue to participate with the rest of the company who 
will still be using Office.  If that doesn't work, dual-boot.

I have looked at Ximian for Exchange interoperability.  It'll run me $99 for 
the desktop and another $69 for Exchange interoperability.  If push comes to 
shove, I might be able to use OWA but the Exchange server has a severe limit on 
the size of mailboxes and I store most of my mail on my PC.  Has anyone else 
used this to be the sole Linux geek in a Windows company?

As far as Code goes, I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and learn something 
else.  Bearing in mind that my work PC is a PII-450 with 128MB RAM and 1.6Gb 
left of disk, any thoughts on an editor that is iSeries-friendly?

Does this whole plan even sound feasible?  Or would I be better off to spend 
less time at work and more time on the computer at home where I can cobble a PC 
together to load Linux et. al.  That ought to make the family happy, eh?  :-)
  --buck