Two questions

paul - 

One of the best resources is the various #gnome channels on irc.freenode.net. There is one program
that might help you called "gnome superuser" written by the late Marc Finlay that is a step in the
right direction. Said application only provides a GUI command line to execute root commands, but
it really can come in handy. I've written a few shell scripts that I placed in my root $PATH that
execute commands as to negate having to enter long strings to accomplish something. Can you
provide some examples of what you want to do? 

Ryan