I switched to Mint (a distro based on Ubuntu), a while ago on my main work machine (hence the Linux related poss on my blog). I am still a newbie and need to do a lot of Googling to find how to accomplish certain tasks. I had to find the encoding of an html file today and spent a good 10 minutes finding the terminal command. Note that I am not talking about the encoding declaration that you find in the meta tag, I am trying to find the encoding of the text file.
If I was on Windows, the file would be open in Notepad and File > Save As would be a quick way to check the current file encoding.
As usual Linux had an easy command to display the information that I needed. The complicated part was to find that command.
To display the file encoding on Linux run the following command:
file -bi yourfile.html