I have been using Ubuntu for quite a while now, but one thing I really dislike is that all the themes are huge space wasters compared to Windows XP. This finally got me angry enough to create a customized version of the Clearlooks theme that tries to be very compact but still maintain its beautiful [...]

In Ubuntu 7.10 the boot hard disk is checked every 20 boots. I have to boot my laptop quite often, so about once a week booting takes more than 10 minutes. This clearly sucks. Fortunately, there is an easy way to fix this. With tune2fs it is possible to change the interval from mount-times to [...]

Linux has an abundance of excellent terminal applications. Interestingly, I could not find any decent comparison of their text display performance. Since I use the command line a lot, I want text output that is as fast as possible. When you compile a large project, you don’t want the console output to be the limiting [...]

This is a very condensed excerpt of the excellent article How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu.
Search, install, remove available packages (preferred method)
sudo aptitude search ABC
sudo aptitude install ABC
sudo aptitude remove ABC
.deb (you have to take care of dependencies on your own)
sudo dpkg -i ABC.deb
.rpm (requires sudo aptitude install alien)
sudo alien -i *.rpm
.tar.gz (requires sudo aptitude [...]