I've used the latest development kernel for my installation : linux-2.3.99-pre6.
It's quite stable and has all the necessary features. You can also find some
downports, which are patches for old 2.2.x kernels. You can find all the infos
on the backport at http://www.suse.cz/development/usb-backport
For having all the abilities of your tablet, you'll need to use XInput.
More specifically you'll need the xf86Wacom.so module (that is shipped with
the most recent versions of XFRee86 starting from 3.3.5). Alternately, you
may need the xf86WacomUSB.so, which is a work-in-progress of adapting the original
xf86Wacom.so to use the USB. I'll speak of it later in this document.
The Gimp - a powerful image manipulation program in the style of Photoshop.
The 1.1.x instable development version includes XInput support as a standard
feature. You can obtain Gimp from http://www.gimp.org
gsumi - a simple B/W drawing program that supports drawing / erasing with
pressure and tilt sensitivity. Get it from the gsumi web page: http://www.gtk.org/~otaylor/gsumi/
xink (By Ralph Levien) - another rudimentary drawing program for X. xink
is available from: ftp://kiwi.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/raph/xink.tar.gz
RasMol - a molecular visualization program that supports a hardware dial
box using XInput. look at http://www.umass.edu/microbio/rasmol/distrib/rasman.htm
.
xinput (by Frederic Lepied) - a very useful utility for configuring and
testing XInput devices. xinput is available from: ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/utilities/xinput-1.2.tar.gz