I just got back from a nice weekend trip to Singapore. Worked out of the Singapore office for a few days and then had Saturday to just rummage around where my hotel was. That was fun. Last night, I was kinda noodled, chickened, fished out. So did pizza and a great salad for dinner. I watched a College Football game on ESPN last night as well. That was an added benefit. I love College Football and have not seen a game since being over here. That’s an entire season I have missed this year. Drats 
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While at the airport, this guy running a laptop with Windows 7 was having an interesting problem. It would come out of hibernation or “sleep” but just go right back to sleep again. He was getting frustrated and irritated. He had to do email. He has a wifi account in Singapore. I loaned him a Ubuntu live CD which he booted and was able to do email, download a document, put it in a flash drive for later, read some news. He asked to keep the CD. I told him he would have to pay to get it activated online because it was for a different machine than what it was intended for. We both laughed because of course that is not true. He was impressed that he could boot a live CD, do real work, be productive, and basically have some unknown issue with his laptop’s OS. He said he would repartition his laptop drive and install Ubuntu or just boot it live in more places if the laptop continued to have problems. I told him that he should just use it as he saw fit. Many people I remember like Seth S. never worked with a real system. They would boot this live rescue CD called the BBC we developed at Linuxcare and do all their work of consequence. This meant that no footprint was left on the system being used. Seth would ssh, do web, write scripts, do meaningful and productive stuff. Nowadays the live CDs have full sets of productivity tools on them as well. Why even have a real OS installed on the hardware. In airports or other public places, just use da Linux.
Linux is a great choice for travelers I have found too. Its stable, forgiving of network changes, deals well with stability and the new Ubuntu Karmic has the full monte of tools. All my devices work including a cheapo camera, my android phone, my mp3 player. All goodness!
So, it was fun helping someone bitten by Windows 7 and letting him experience Ubuntu Linux in a way that made him productive. It was a different locale for him. He was used to this other way of working and seeing things happening from a OS not even installed was rather enlightening for him. Consider what you really need to be a tool user. Tools are designed for uses and users. We are the users. Now put them to uses.
