These days most Linux systems use GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader) to provide the Linux booting experience which in most cases looks very basic as you can see from this Wikipedia screenshot: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AGRUB_screenshot.png
In order to change the default background of GRUB you can follow the next simple procedure:
Sometimes it may happen that you have a sound device that you do not use or then you are one of those people how dislike Pulseaudio and use Alsa instead. Especially with Alsa it gets very useful if you have only the sound device enabled which you actually use. Here are some notes about using Alsa instead of Pulseaudio in Linux.
As it may happen sometimes you either work inside a terminal client or you find yourself using a Linux system or a filemanager which does not automatically mount volumes (meaning, for example, usb sticks or external hard drives). The next solution will help you on your mounting efforts.
Mounting devices
First you need to find out what is the address of the device you are trying to mount. Attach your device to your computer and run, for example, gparted to see the device’s address (should be something like /dev/sdb1).
While installing programs the next simple trick might come in handy: create a bash script and let the terminal interface do all the hard work automatically.
First you need to open an empty text file (with gedit, leafpad, kate or any other). After you have the text file in front of you then you can start typing the install commands. For example I used the following very basic install script to set up my Ubuntu box.