I do NOT recommend importing all of your windows fonts to Linux. Sure, you paid for windows, and should be able to use all the windows fonts on any OS you want, but Microsoft (and their lawyers) may not feel the same way. Read your license agreement carefully. Instead, you should install the freely released and  licensed to all for any use Microsoft "core" fonts. (Also, Arial-9 killed my firefox install)

But, if after that warning you still want to import all of your Microsoft Windows truetype fonts from your windows partition to your linux partition and install them system wide, here is what to do:

Gain root privileges: sudo bash

Make a directory to store the fonts: mkdir  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msfonts

Find the fonts on your windows partition, for me this was /media/sda1/Windows/Fonts

copy the fonts over: cp /media/sda1/Windows/Fonts/*.ttf  /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msfonts 

Re-create the font cache:   fc-cache -f -v

Installing Core Microsoft fonts: sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

To make them work in X-windows, you may also want to install x-ttcidfont-conf if it's not already installed: sudo apt-get install x-ttcidfont-conf

The old version of the X.org ati x-server would do a true "clone" of my Thinkpad X31's LCD display out the VGA port on the back of the laptop. The new version shipped with Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy) however doesn't do a true clone, so video overlays (called Xv in linux) will display movies on the LCD but not on the external VGA monitor.

So when you give a presentation with a movie, you can see the movie, but your audience can not! My X31 is able to play most movies without Xv so I decided not to use it. In windows, you can fix this problem by turning off Video Overlay in the display driver control panel. However, under Linux, you have to tell each of your movie players to use something besides Xv.  Standard X11 works, but won't allow you to scale videos. I prefer to use OpenGL, which works very nicely with the open source ati driver.

To make mplayer use OpenGL, edit the ~/.mplayer/config file and add the line "vo=gl2".

To make totem use OpenGL, edit the ~/.gnome2/Totem/xine_config file to include a line  as follows: "video.driver:OpenGL"

BTW- If you are unable to get video showing on your external VGA output, you can run the following command to set up a "clone" or "mirror" display:

 xrandr –output LVDS –mode 1024×768 –output VGA-0 –mode 1024×768 –same-as LVDS

After installing an IPW2200 mini-pci 802.11g wireless card, my wife complained that her system would freeze for a minute while attempting to connect to an 802.11 (WEP) network for the first time. After the initial time-out and failure, wireless network connections would work fine until the computer was rebooted. 

As it turns out, I was experiencing the same problems with my laptop, but I hadn't noticed it because I use suspend/resume a lot more than my wife, and I would go a week or so before doing a full reboot. (One failure to connect to a wireless network per week is a lot less noticeable than one every morning.)

After doing a lot of rebooting and troubleshooting, I isolated a few lines in my /var/log/syslog that appeared to be associated with the freezeup:

eth2: could not initialize WEP: load module ieee80211_crypt_wep

ieee80211_crypt_wep: could not allocate crypto API arc4

Even though my system (Ubuntu 7.04) had the arc4 crypto module, it didn't appear to be loading correctly. I added "arc4" to my /etc/modules file to force it to be loaded, and that appears to have fixed the problem.

Copying a streaming video to a file using mencoder.

I wanted to watch Randy Pausch's last lecture on my home media PC as opposed to my laptop. It has MythTV, which can be used to watch any file on the hard disk. Unfortunately, you can't just download the a file, as his lecture is hosted by a streaming server. The specific URL is:

mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv  

wget won't work, so I had to use mencoder to download the stream and copy it to a file on my hard disk. The command line I used was:

 mencoder mms://wms.andrew.cmu.edu/001/pausch.wmv -o randy.wmv -oac copy -ovc copy

(The -oac and -ovc are the output audio and video codec specfiers, and I have set it to just copy. If you would prefer the file be transcoded to a different format, you could specify a specific codec (xvid with ogg vorbis sound, for example) and mencoder would transcode the file (possibly losing some quality) at the same time.