I stopped by my brothers house, and his wife has a Bamboo tablet. I
plugged it into my Aspire one using Ubuntu 10.04 and it was working
without anything else done. I installed the application inkscape and the
only function not in the Linux version was pressure sensitivity.

I don't know what version of Ubuntu you are using but why not upgrade to
10.04? Everything seems to work better, or work at all, when upgrading
because the drivers are in the latest kernel if they have been made
available. Dependencies have a way of getting in the way when compiling
drivers so to avoid these problems I just wait until I can get the
latest release of Ubuntu to make things work. Just a note. I have all
my hardware working on this machine.

I have been using Ubuntu since 8.04 and the improvements are
unbelievable, what a ride!