Can I issue a command that will tell me how much memory is used or free as well as how much CPU is being used? I telnet into my Ubuntu box so I would like to pull stats through issuing commands versus using VNC

To find what memory is being used and what is free you can issue the command

$free -m

If you want to get information about your machine using a command issue

$sudo dmidecode | more

or

$lshw

For CPU information, issue the command

$cat /proc/cpuinfo

What I use personally is the command

$top

This tells me everything I need to know in most cases in one screen