@chris: As far as putting it into Ubuntu, it might be worth looking into, but I don't use a Debian-based system, so I'm not sure of the details of how packages get in the repository.

Now, as far as the crash, I'd prefer to take that into the Support forum, as I'd intended this thread to be stickied and closed; there just haven't been any moderators around to take care of it.

I would, however, make sure you have these packages installed:
gtk2, opengl, libbz2, libjpeg, glew-dev, libxxf86vm-dev, x11proto-xf86vidmode
automake and autoconf (verion >= 1.9)
Nvidia Cg-Toolkit (http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_toolkit.html)
libasound-dev, & joystick

@sasuke: It's the svn version plus a few minor fixes, but that wasn't changed that much from 0.9.4. And as far as Playground still compiling on Linux, that's a large part of what I do on the Playground team...