Okay, after another post by someone else pointing me in the right direction I stumbled across this site: http://www.ohmpie.com/mining-on-an-r9-290-in-linux/

This goes into detail on how to patch the latest linux driver (13.12) and actually has a link to some .deb binaries so you may not even need to patch. If you can get that far...

Then you need to recompile cgminer from source, from the tarball linked on their site. I am gonna give it a go here within the next 24 hours. If you don't think you can do this then I'd forget the r9 290s for now... I am familiar with linux and patching source and compiling in linux. Really from what I've read it shouldn't be too difficult (might eat my words on that). Anyway, I'll let you all know if I can get them up running stable and post you all my history log so you can see how I did it. Figured I'd post what I've figured out so far for those technically inclined to move forward themselves.