Linux good to know

Terminal window

The "terminator" terminal (red-ish icon with four tiles in the left hand side launchbar) is quite powerful and allows you to add many terminals inside the terminator window. You do this by right-clicking in the window and selecting split horizontally/vertically. This is very helpful when you need many terminal windows at the same time and do not want to have to manage which hides which etc.

You can easily change the size of the font by pressing ctrl and then scrolling up/down with your mouse wheel.

Unable to install a package

If you try to install a package using apt-get the system might respond that it is not possible at the moment

wasp@WASPMac:~$ sudo apt-get install octave
E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

There are two main reasons for that

The system is checking for updates. Wait a minute or so and it should solve the problem.
You are already installing some package(s) in another window. Wait until that process is done

You can check if if the system is installing, checking, etc your system's packages by seeing if the following command returns something

ps aux | grep dpkg

i.e., list all processes and only display those lines that contain "dpkg" which is the program that handles packages.

Copy and paste in Linux

Remember that copy and paste in Linux is not ctrl-c/v but rather ctrl+shift+c/v.