To achieve 100% transparent panels within Ubuntu, this involves modifying the default theme (Ambience).
sudo cp -R /usr/share/themes/Ambiance ~/.themes/ sudo gedit ~/.themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/apps/gnome-panel.rc
Then comment out the following line, as below
#bg_pixmap[NORMAL] = "img/panel.png"
A theme switch (from System > Preferences > Appearance) is required for changes to be applied. Now setting the transparency on panels effects all areas 
A really thorough guide to backing up your Linux system including;
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem
A number of backup/restore utilities are mentioned on the above page, my favourite being the simple TAR tool. Details on backing up using TAR can be found here…
This is a really useful technique I recently discovered which allows you to bind a port on your local machine to the local port on a remote machine. Why would you want to do this?
Well in my case I was working on a remote web server via ssh, setting up some web aplications on various different ports. The hosting company had yet to open these ports to the outside world. However, this technique allowed me to bind the local ports on the remote machine (running the web applications) to my local machine. This allowed me to test and configure each application as if it was installed on my local machine, simply by accessing localhost:xx in my browser. The port numbers don’t even have to match! I ended up binding remote port 8080 to port 80 on my local machine.
This can be achieved by issuing the following command on the local machine…
ssh $REMOTE_IP -L $REMOTE_PORT:localhost:$LOCAL_PORT
Example binding remote 8080 to local 80:
ssh myhost.com -L 8080:localhost:80
After updating to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS everything seemed to have gone smoothly but for some reason the window buttons have shifted to the left for this release! The following tutorial shows how to put them back to the right and only takes around 30 seconds to apply.
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/13535/move-window-buttons-back-to-the-right-in-ubuntu-10.04/
Today I discovered the mkisofs command, a general linux command not specific to Ubuntu. This command enables you to make an ISO disk image of any folder or group of files on your hard drive or external media. I used it today to make an ISO file of a CD which appears to have worked perfectly using the following command
mkisofs -o EPSON.iso /media/cdrom0
The -o parameter specifies the desired output file-name (in this case EPSON.iso). This command has literally hundreds of paramaters which are explained better than I would even attempt here.
Thanks to my friend Dave I today learnt the command in ubuntu that would be the equivalent to
explorer.exe “E:/”
And that is…
nautilus “/media/cdrom0″
The reason for wanting to do this was i wanted to make an application launcher on the tool bar link to a location, some to network paths ( smb:// ) and some to local mount points.
As with the structure of the windows command, nautilus is a window manager as is explorer.exe on windows. Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop and any valid path can be passed as a parameter in terminal.
