Stupid gedit won’t save to cifs share (ubuntu 9.10 karmic)
So stupid gedit (which is fantastic on all other ways) won't save to a cifs mounted share properly because of an unsupported copy option. Robbie Basak has provided a patched version that overcomes this issue. To install this in karmic, do the following:
AMD64:
cd /tmp wget https://launchpad.net/~racb/+archive/fixes/+files/gedit_2.28.0-0ubuntu2~basak1_amd64.deb sudo dpkg -i gedit_2.28.0-0ubuntu2~basak1_amd64.deb
i386:
cd /tmp wget https://launchpad.net/~racb/+archive/fixes/+files/gedit_2.28.0-0ubuntu2~basak1_i386.deb sudo dpkg -i gedit_2.28.0-0ubuntu2~basak1_i386.deb
I believe that redhat has updated the version in their repos, perhaps Shuttleworth et al should do the same...
LAMP on debian (ubuntu mint etc) One line install
Installing a LAMP stack on deb has never been easier!
sudo tasksel install lamp-server
Nice Gnome themes
unixmen has a nice collection of gnome themes. Anything is better than the ubuntu human theme 
Ubuntu Perl cpan problem
While trying to install various Perl modules I was getting errors like:
"/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:420:24: error: sys/types.h: No such file or direct"
and a load more complaints of missing ".h" files
This is because Ubuntu isn't shipped as Linux for "Developers" but more for end users and so it isn't preinstalled with all sorts of development header files needed for compiling your own or others programs.
So, as root, I ran:
apt-get install libexpat1-dev
And that solved the problems.