Font hinting in Knoppix 3.7. Does it even happen??

Hi folks, I'm new, it's nice to meet everyone.

It's been a while since I've played around in Knoppix so I recently downloaded 3.7 and played around with it. This thing just keeps gettin' better and better, :-), gotta love Linux. But there's something I hate. Fonts in X. They still mostly suck. My problem is Windows has spoiled me. I like having font smoothing on only high point fonts, and no smoothing on those small fonts to preserve that crisp contrast. Trouble is, without anti-aliasing, it seems like the fonts aren't even being hinted, the below screen shot was taken in Konquerer with anti-aliasing turned on in the control center with sub-pixel hinting set on full with Vertical RGB with an exclusion range of 8pt - 15 pt fonts. The font used is Arial from the msfttcorefonts. The contrast between the larger point font and the body text is striking. If those non-anti-aliased body fonts are hinted I'm a monkey's uncle.

http://img38.exs.cx/img38/5594/snapshot10xu.png

My question is, maybe they are hinted? I don't a have a frame of reference for how well the font hinting is in X with freetype compared to Windows. I've been doing some research and I've mostly just confused myself even more. Aparently there's two kinds of hinting available in Freetype 2, the legal and the illegal kind (that bytecode stuff). From my understanding, most Linux distros don't have the bytecode hinting compiled into the Freetype library because of potential legal issues, and instead rely on a different hinting method, the autohinter. So, is the above screenshot indicative of freetype 2's autohinter? Or does hinting just not work with Knoppix 3.7? Any enlightment is greatly appeciated. I'd honestly like to believe the latter, because I won't be using Linux as my desktop replacement anytime soon if that's freetype's opinion of a properly hinted font.