Before I start: I'm a Mac user whose 7 year old laptop is slowly dying and, wanting to support open-source software, I've been considering a Linux pre-loaded laptop as my next computer. In preparation for the shock of a new operating system I've been playing with Xubuntu as a VM on my iMac for the past couple of days. I love it but I have no idea what I'm doing really.

I am a typography enthusiast and as such can't do without gorgeous free fonts. So, despite feeling that the experiment was doomed to failure, I decided to download a heap of fonts and attempt to install them. They were all .ttf format, so I thought it should be possible, and I know where the fonts folder is so I can put them there manually if necessary. But...nope. I've been stalled by my number 1 problem since I started playing around with Linux: I CAN'T FIND THE DOWNLOADED FILES. AT ALL. So I can't do ANYTHING with them, because I don't know what they're called, or where they are, or even if they're there at all.

They were zips and automatically extracted when I downloaded them. At least, I ASSUME they automatically extracted, because the archive manager window appeared to show the files that had been extracted (when I downloaded the fonts Firefox asked me 'Open with Archive Manager?' and I said yes.)

As far as I remember it said they were extracted to the home folder. But, as mentioned previously, I can't find them. I've done a catfish file search for .ttf, all hidden files shown (I don't put much faith in Catfish, as I don't think it REALLY searches everything, but I was prepared to try anything). I also downloaded Fonty Python to see if it could find them; I got it to run through every folder and sub-folder on the virtual drive, but nope, it only found the Microsoft fonts that were already installed. I looked in the fonts folder myself just in case. No luck.

I have no idea what to do. It's like when I download certain things they just vanish without a trace. As a complete Linux newbie, maybe I'm missing something really obvious here...