[ILUG] Ubuntu - teething troubles

[Pangurban]

Recently installed Ubuntu (6.06) on my trusty old machine.  Most of my
previous Linux experience is with Red Hat (-> Fedora) (since 3) and have
run into a few snags.

Configuring grub

noapic acpi=off -- is a required setting for my hardware.  So I added it
to menu.list.  Having fumbled and found it.  But something, I assume the
updater, is changing it back and leaving me without.  Bit of pain -
having to re-edit on every restart. Anyone know how to make it a "default".

Configuring Apt-get

I had (almost) got the hang of YUM - could anyone tell me how best to
configure Apt-get to deal with convenient  (lets say Irish) "repositories" ?

Configuring multimedia stuff

MP3s - (yes! for various reasons and I do not want to be convinced that
Ogg Vorbis is better - it may be, but I want to use MP3).

Anyone have a step by step instruction as to how to get Rythmbox (or
whatever) playing mp3s conveniently.  Had it in Fedora 5 from a howto
and can (if I have to ) figure it out again  (but) a little help would
be appreciated.


Regards,


Brian