@X and devil: The problem is I have the latest and greatest.
A HD audio driver and a HD3870 video card.
I got the ati driver to work on Ubuntu through some wrangling, but it does not like me to change the settings too much.
Multimonitor support is not recommended, especially with Compix fusion.
The sound is really weak, and it's a known issue.
I googled my fingers raw, but most of the help info is two years or more old. I got LTS 8.04, and it still has a few bugs.