Making the most of Linux multimedia

Early Linux desktops were crude affairs, sharing more in common with scientific workstations than modern consumer PCs. But thanks to the efforts of Linux vendors, video card manufacturers, and open source developers, today’s Linux distributions offer GUI flash and sizzle to rival the latest offerings from Apple or Microsoft.

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Ubuntu enables many graphics features by default during the installation process, but a few situations still may require additional tweaking.

Power up your video card
The graphics hardware market is highly competitive, and video card makers are reluctant to release much information about the internal workings of their products. Because of this, developing open source video drivers that support modern features such as 3-D acceleration has been an uphill climb.

Fortunately, both ATI and nVidia offer custom Linux device drivers for their products. These drivers are proprietary software, which means Ubuntu will not install them by default. If your PC includes hardware from one of these vendors, you can enable the accelerated driver from the System > Administration > Restricted Drivers Manager control panel.

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Fancify  your fonts
If you’ve installed Ubuntu on a laptop or a PC with an LCD monitor, you can improve the readability of onscreen text by enabling subpixel font smoothing, the equivalent of Microsoft’s ClearType technology. You’ll find the option under the System > Preferences > Appearance control panel, in the Fonts tab. Experiment with the options under the Details menu to find the settings that best suit your taste.

If you’d like to recreate the Windows font experience even further, use Synaptic to install the “msttcorefonts” package, and your Linux applications will have access to familiar Microsoft typefaces, such as Arial, Courier New, and Times New Roman.

Configure desktop effects
The most talked-about recent development in the world of desktop Linux is Compiz Fusion, a new GUI manager that offers a variety of eye-popping animations and other graphical effects for common

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GUI functions. The most striking is the “desktop cube,” which allows you to switch between multiple desktop workspaces by rotating a 3-D box with your mouse.