Oh well, good to see you (sort of) sorted it out.
I just upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 and the difference is amazing. I really like this all-brown theme in Gnome that (not the dodgy default brown one) and I've finally tried desktop effects (Compiz) - it's pretty fun and looks good.
Once my beefed up mac mini arrives I'll try out games under WINE properly (this comp wouldn't run most of them on Windows let alone Linux), but so far JK2 and Jedi Academy (use Quake 3 engine) work perfectly. It also auto-detected my graphics card and installed nVidia's linux driver for me.
Oh, and the tablet pen draws even better than on Windows! I still need to get the eraser working, though. I must have made a typo in X.org config.