Hi there!
This page is intended for personal use, but published publicly so anyone who find this information useful can use it. I am collecting data about different topics. This is for Debian with Gnome by the way.
Decompressing
OK, so you have a compressed file and you want to decompress it. Tarballs are usually compressed using te gz extension. Fine, use the following command:
$ tar zxvf foo.tar.gz
Why zxvf? Basically, z for the gzip compression; x to extract the files from the tarball; v makes the output more verbose; and f indicates that the next argument is the file. If the tarball is compressed using the bz2 extension (this is how GHC is usually shipped), replace z with j.
$ tar jxvf foo.tar.bz2
Removing launchers
If you added a launcher in your desktop bar, you may want to remove it later. To do so, instead of just right clicking (which only will allow you to launch it or modify it), press ALT + right click. This will open the options "Move" and "Remove From Panel". Press the second option and you are done.
Running things at start
Open the "Run application" window (with ALT+F2) and run gnome-session-properties. There you can manage your commands and applications that run at start.
How to kill a process that owns a particular port
Just run this:
sudo netstat -ap | grep :
Editing your network connections
To edit network connections with the network-manager, run the following command:
sudo nm-connection-editor
Once you have edited it, you can restart the network-manager with
/etc/init.d/network-manage restart