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Remote Desktop similar to Teamviewer?
I'm used to being able to help my parents through iChat screen sharing on OS X and Remote Assistance on Windows. Is there something that has the same workflow (no setup, works through NATs and firewalls) available for Ubuntu? I'd be very nervous about migrating them to Ubuntu without the ability to help them remotely.
What's the general rule for when to install a package from the official .deb repositories, versus when to install with the language's package manager? The ones in the upstream repositories are frequently at least slightly out-of-date, but I also don't want to have my packages colliding with the "official" ones, and it seems that aptitude is going to force me to install the official ones in many cases anyway.
Every time I click on the application or system menus, I notice that no icons show up for a second, then they page in. Is there some way to explicitly tell Ubuntu to cache this? My SuSE (GNOME) desktop doesn't have this problem, but I don't know whether that's because they're doing something custom, or because it's a setting I'm missing.
I've upgraded Ubuntu on my laptop all the way from 7.04 to 10.04 without ever wiping the disk. I have a sneaking suspicion that means I have a bunch of crufty packages that I don't use and that are just taking up disk. Is there any way to get a list of all the packages included that are beyond the base install?