Boot-Up Manager

Boot-Up Manager is an application to handle run-levels configuration of any Debian derivative system. With this program the user will easily start and stop boot-up scripts, change their startup order, without the necessity to handle through complex links and permissions.

It's a good tool to see quickly what gets started on your Ubuntu system under the hood.

It can be installed directly from the application menu or with

sudo apt-get install bum

or click here.

Boot-up management from the shell

If you prefer the shell to configure these run-levels, have a look at the update-rc.d command, which can configure the different run-levels for any script that resides in /etc/init.d.
Want to install a new service on your Debian system?; just do this:

sudo -v
sudo cp myservice /etc/init.d
sudo update-rc.d myservice defaults

GRUB for DOS

GRUB4DOS is an universal boot loader based on GNU GRUB, it's the DOS extension of GRUB.
It enables dos users to run the configuration console directly in real mode.
It can boot off DOS/LINUX, or via Windows boot manager/syslinux/lilo, or from MBR/CD.
It also has builtin BIOS disk emulation, ATAPI CDROM driver, etc.

It's much more powerful than Linux Grub and you should read its tutorial here to learn about all its options.
It's impressive.

The project also contains an utility called WINGRUB, an GUI intends to help configuring and installing GRUB in the WINDOWS environment.
This is very useful whenever your Windows destroys GRUBs MBR and you don't want to restart your system from a Linux LiveCD for recovering. With WinGrub you can do this directly from Windows.

Remote Desktops

UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location.

UltraVNC runs under Windows operating systems (95, 98, Me, NT4, 2000, XP, 2003...). Its embedded Java Viewer allows you to connect (and make File transfers) from a simple Web Browser on any Operating system supporting Java (Linux, Mac OS...) to an UltraVNC server.

You can connect directly from your Ubuntu desktop with tsclient (Applications --> Internet --> Terminal Server Client).
Previously, you have to ensure you have the VNC Client installed as well:

sudo apt-get install vnc-viewer

Then you can select VNC as connection protocol to connect to your Windows box from Linux.

Tip: Use the special F8 key

Most of the VNC clients have a special mapping for the F8 key. A menu will open and you can

• send the F8 key to the remote desktop
• send Ctlr-Alt-Del to the remote desktop
• change the preferences of the VNC client
• and other stuff depending on the client