What about the idea of carrying your operating system whereever you go? I am not talking about bringing your laptop everywhere you go, instead use your pendrive to carry your linux distro. Not simply the live distro, you can carry your operating system with all your configurations, favorite desktop background and personal files.

Power users of Ubunto knows howto create a Bootable Ubuntu USB PenDrive. But Newbies have some confusions. From Ubuntu 8.10 onwords Ubuntu included a tool for making usb bootable. It is very simple.
USB Startup Disk creator tool

Requiremets:

1. A USB Pendrive with Minimum 700 MB

2. An Ubuntu CD or Ubuntu CD iso file.

Since most laptop and desktop computers these days can boot from a USB drive, one of the handiest utilities in my toolbox is an installation of Pendrive Linux.

RMS GNU/Linux-Libre is a project to create a complete free software distribution of GNU/Linux that's small enough to run on a USB key, or pendrive. The distribution, which promises to be the perfect pocket companion of freedom lovers, supports the ability to save your changes to the pendrive, as well as install, update and disable software packages in the form of modules.

It is reported that Microsoft recently obtained patent for "Operating System Shutdown". In simpler words, Microsoft now holds the intellectual property rights for 'shutting down an operating system'.

How you can assign ubuntu to shutdown after a particular time

Sometime during the Ubuntu 9.04 release, Canonical added a 60-second delay when Reboot or Shutdown was selected. At that time it was at least possible to go to the "User Switcher Preferences" and disable the delay. Now, with the 9.10 release, that disable option seems to have disappeared.

Molly-Guard is a command line script which prevents you from accidentally shutting down or rebooting your Ubuntu system.

There is not an application like Windows Device Manager Ubuntu. Gnome-Device-Manager is the Ubuntu equivalent for the Windows Device Manager application. it's not installed by default. Gnome Device Manager is a front-end, or GUI, to the HAL daemon service.