One of my most used tasks in my daily life as an astronomer is [DS9], yes it has a geeky name, but its a darn solid piece of software. I recently decided that I wanted to use it on my Ubuntu machine at home (I quite often just use it over the network from my wok machine) and I have to say I was pleased to find it in the standard repositories, so a simple:
sudo apt-get install saods9
(at the commandline, of course) got it running and then a simple "ds9" from then onwards has me running it... great! 
