Ubuntu Linux Boot CD - don’t leave home without it

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If you do a reasonable amount of business travel and carry a notebook personal computer with you, it’s probably a good idea to also carry a Ubuntu bootable CD and a USB drive with your most important files on it. Think of it as very cheap business insurance.

Murphy’s Law states: anything that can go wrong with a PC, will go wrong with a PC, and usually at the most inconvenient time.

Here’s an example. A friend on mine traveled to Sydney last week to do some sales training. He has his Powerpoint slides on his Dell, Vista-based PC.

To save battery life while mobile, he had fiddled around with the power settings. Bad idea.

Come presentation time his Powerpoint slides didn’t display properly. After each click he had to wait up to 30 seconds for the next slide to appear. Very disconcerting to him and his audience. He tried putting the setting back to the way they were, but to no avail.

If he had a Ubuntu boot CD with him, he could have recovered this situation in about 2 minutes. All he had to do was insert the boot CD in the CD drive, ensure that his notebook’s BIOS was set to boot from CD, then go for it.

His Dell would have loaded the Ubuntu in a minute or two at which time he could have proceeded with his course.

Ubuntu comes with Open Office. Open Office can read and edit Powerpoint slides. He would have been in business.

So the bottom line is, always carry a Ubuntu boot CD with you. And for added insurance, also carry your most important files on a USB drive. For less than $20 it’s very cheap insurance. Here’s a Linux product pack you may be interested in.