"Unsupported Archive Type"

I got this error message every time I double-clicked a .rar file. A little research showed I should be using a program called unrar.

Use the Synaptic Package Manager to install unrar. You will be prompted for your administrative password.

Now double-click that file again!

Browse your files as root

The whole root thing is a difficult hurdle for us seasoned Windows users. Sometimes all you want to do is change permissions, or move a file into a root directory, and the command line stuff is daunting.

The easy way? At the command line, type sudo nautilus. This opens the file browser in the familiar Windows-looking format, but you're logged on as root. BEWARE! you can do a lot of damage as root, so don't make much of a habit of using this.

Say there's a file you want to run as a non-root user, or you want to make a file executable. Just right-click the file in Nautilus and click Properties, then in the Premissions tab, make your changes.

Easy!

Burn to CDRW with K3B

I found it easy to drag and drop files to a CDRW the first time, but then I was in trouble. When the disk finished burning, Linux had assigned the disk to root, and I couldn't re-use it no matter what I tried. I searched the Ubuntu forum for answers, but all I found was other newbies who had the same problem, and helpful experts giving complex answers that weren't solving the problem. So I left the forum, and found this solution on the web at large.

1. using the Synaptic Package Manager, install a program called K3B, which is a CD and DVD burning program. There are lots of burning tools in Linux, but for some reason K3B has the features to overcome this obstacle, while the others stop cold.

2. Run sudo k3b to run the program as root.

3. In the Tools menu, choose Erase CD-RW to clear the old stuff from the disk.

4. The rest is much like using a Windows program.

Worked for me.