OK, I signed up on the site, and I have a bitcoin program going. My question: how do I get the two to talk?

I need a nice, Hand-holdy, step-by-step for getting a linux box (ubuntu 9.04) up and running with ya.

I'm fairly comfortable in the command line, but not so much in building from source.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

edit: oops 10.04 - forgot I upgraded to the LTS