Tweaking my Karmic Koala

I'm now on my third attempt at installing Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala on 8 old Dell Latitude laptops which will form my Magnificent Mobile Menagerie. Third attempt because I keep messing up the system fonts whilst trying to remove extraneous fonts from /usr/share/fonts, as I want to reduce the clutter on the font menus.

I may have to curb my obsession with neat and tidiness, which thankfully only finds full vent in computerworld, as I can't figure out which fonts are required by the system. Please please please can someone improve Linux's font handling capabilities!

BTW, the fonts I'm installing are Microsoft's "core fonts for the web" (Arial, Times New Roman, Verdana etc.) plus some rather delicious properly free fonts, such as Droid, Profont, GNU FreeFont and DejaVu

The other tweak is to reduce the visual effects enabled by default in Karmic Koala. I'm not a whizzy-cube sort of guy, and the laptops are pretty old, so I normally set the System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects to None. The problem is that in Ubuntu 9.10, my favourite application launcher GNOME Do “requires composting” (see You mean Ubuntu isn't perfect?!?). The way around this is to install Simple Compiz Config Settings Manager, and then choose the Minimal profile from the Appearances -> Custom tab.