It can take upwards of a half hour or more to trudge though package selection, but it pays off in space savings and making sure all the stuff you really need gets installed. The Mach64 X server is used for this chipset. Supported by ALSA drivers, but kinda flaky, a real PITA to set up and not fully compatible with all that software out there written against the OSS interface. I'm working to resolve this with the module maintainer. Otherwise, mark this one unresolved.
Combo cards can get kinda pricey.
Playing DVD's is another matter. It will behave somewhat erratically, but not quite bad enough to prompt total insanity. I've even had it lock up the GUI on me once. The trick is to make a small mod to the kernel. There are patches for older kernels, but they don't work for 2.2.12 apparently.