• Firstly, when doing hardware maintenance, remember to plug all leads back in. (I’m so glad I’m not the only one who’s forgotten this: http://err.no/personal/blog/tech/2007-02-06-12-38_powerless_disks)

• To open a terminal in Ubuntu, go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal

• To add shortcuts from the applications listing to your desktop or top/bottom panel, browse to the location of the program under applications, click on it DON’T LET GO, and drag it to the bar at the top, or onto you desktop. Let go.

• To run a unattended upgrade on an (K/X/U)buntu machine use the following command in a terminal:

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade -y

• If you only want the upgrades to be downloaded, and not installed as well, then use this one (I think, this hasn’t been tested, and you could probably do it a bit more neatly with -dy):

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade -d -y

• Most linux variants store their programs (e.g. lspci) under /usr/sbin
• To force evolution (linux version of MS Outlook) to close completely, open a terminal, and run the following command:

evolution --force-shutdown