Ubuntu part #3

Some more updates:

The weird font display has been greatly improved by installing the latest versions of freetype, see this thread for details. Installing the MS core fonts package has helped as well, as web pages are now being displayed using the same fonts they would be on Windows.

I'll have to give up on getting Beryl (fancy desktop effects) working for now. It seems the drivers for the later ATI cards don't yet support the funky stuff required to run those sorts of apps (among other things - basically, ATI on Linux sucks). There's some more info on the ubuntu forums, and a short-but-sweet confirmation on AMD's knowledge base.

I'm still having a suprising amount of difficulty connecting to the samba share on my web dev box. Googling anything remotely connected to this reveals hundreds of articles on how to share files from your Ubuntu PC using samba, but what I want to do is the reverse. But I'm sure I'll figure it out.

Installing mplayer has given me some better movie file playback (there's some weird codec issue with the built-in player - the colours on most AVI files appear odd).  Next I need to figure out how to change the default file associations, so these files open in mplayer by default. Still no look with the 5.1 sound, I think it's due to a lack of driver for my onboard sound card. More investigation required.