#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!