Recently my nephew came to visit and brought his computer. It was running WinXP and he said the CD drives were broken, and it needed a new motherboard! Well, since he’s only 12 his diagnosis was understandably quite a bit off. There’s no need to pay a technician huge sums of money to “fix” this broken system, with my trusty case full of live Linux discs I was ready to start.

First, we booted into Windows– It did not recognize the CD drives in the computer, Device Manager reported a problem with the drivers, indicated by yellow exclamation points.

Now, normally a casual Windows user would have to start jumping through hoops trying to figure out how to fix the drivers problem, but in this case he was done with Windows, what with all the spyware and general instability problems, and he was ready to give Linux a try. So, we turned off the PC, let it sit for 10 seconds, then turned it on, inserted the Linux Live disc (Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala), and booted up into Linux.

Some argue that Windows is inherently easier to use than Linux, while that may have been true 15 years ago before the Graphical User Interface became increasingly popular for Linux distros, nowadays there are new advantages to the less-savvy computer to really like about Linux.

For instance, look at this example about problems with drivers for CD-ROM drives. Most Linux distros come complete with CD-ROM drivers, video drivers, USB device drivers (Like my Linksys Wireless-G stick) which has never been the case with Microsoft’s Windows. When you first install Windows on a PC you aren’t done yet–Oh no, it will probably a couple hours for you to track down all the proper drivers for your system. Linux- put your Live CD in the drive, boot up and go!

And, if you want to add more software to your Linux system, you have the convenience of Package Managers.  All the biggest Linux distros have thousands of all different types of applications available from games, to business, to development specifically put together for that particular distro. For instance, Ubuntu has over 20,000 different programs known as “packages” that are each uniquely tailored to your particular ditribution. Package managers resolve dependency problems which have historically plagued operating systems like Linux because there were specific versions of individual files required by some programs that weren’t already installed on the system, resulting in problems.

Getting out of the “Windows mindset” gives one the freedom to expand his horizons when it comes to getting the most out of one’s computer system with the least cost.

#1 Families with kids who use the computer

Those of us who have kids know that they aren’t so savvy about what not to click on especially when surfing the Internet. Without a mindful grownup watching everything his child does online, problems are soon to crop up. Leave a 10 year old alone for an hour by himself on the family PC and I will say with almost 100% certainty that their will be spyware and viruses on that computer! Besides the obvious danger involved in letting kids surf the web without proper filters, the great chance of them clicking on those fancy “animated cursor ads”, or any of a vast number of fancy Flash attention grabbers will absolutely fill your Windows PC with security threats.

So what’s the solution, you ask

The solution to this problem is to use a Linux Live CD on that computer! Simply put a Live CD in the CD-ROM drive, shutdown your Windows machine, and when you turn it back on, you will have a menu appear that will allow you to boot into one of many Linux Operating Systems, and they can click and surf with abandon since the Linux Live environment will not touch your installed Windows system.

The image above shows what you see when you put in the Linux disc, in this case we use Ubuntu, it’s the most popular but there are surely scores of other Linux distros that will work very well.

Using Linux as a Live CD is certainly a fun endeavor, but it does have a few drawbacks–namely, the most important difference for most of them is that anything you do in Linux while in the Live environment will not be save once you’re done and restart the computer. Anything you change, like adding programs, changing system settings, etc., will all be gone for next time. But this shouldn’t be a problem for the casual Linux dabbler.

#2 People who use many different computers

What do you do when find yourself with several different computers at home, and you like to go to your friends’ houses and use their computers? Maybe you want to show them what your doing on your computer, but you don’t really want to drag an entire desktop computer to someone’s house, do you?

So what’s the solution, you ask

The answer is, you can install your entire system onto one of those small USB memory sticks. As long as the computer you stick it into supports booting from USB (and most modern computer do), then you can simply take your PC with you in your pocket!

And Ubuntu makes this very simple to do since they have a command to create a “USB Startup Disk”:

It’s really that simple- Once you have your “Startup Disk”, you really have a full Ubuntu installation on a Flash drive that ‘s only limited by the capacity of the drive.

As you can see, these are just two examples of how people who wouldn’t normally think that they would have a good use for that “other” operating system, there really are some great “out-of-the-box” uses for Linux besides the everyday use some may find intimidating.

Check back here for more great uses of Linux and thanks for reading!