Help for an Ubuntu novice

[Choni]

Hello,

I have an A31 with the dreaded ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 card and installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04. My hope is to used the machine as a media center for playing music, DVD´s etc. on my Samsung HD-ready TV which comes with all sorts of nice inputs, including S-Video and a VGA port. I have purchased a USB 2.0 cardbus to connect to my external hardrive because the 1.1 ports were too slow.

I have many problems with the ATI card, for example the Gnome desktop crashes if I activate desktop effects and video does not play on my television no matter what resolution I put.

I have been reading around a lot and, being new to the linux environment, still cannot figure out exactly what I must do to get the fn keys functioning.

Soon, I would like to add a wireless keyboard and mouse and leave the laptop closed using the television as a monitor permanently and hopefully run MythTV as well.

I will try running Envy soon (http://www.albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html) to see if that helps. My problem is that all the help I find assumes you have some knowledge of the OS can many times do not explain well exactly which file must be edited, etc.

I guess what I really need to know are the steps I must take to get to this point. Is there anyone with the time and patience to help me?