Along with the post below, I wanted to mention a couple of things I needed to do to make Emacs usable for me in Ubuntu.
First, a great package for getting nicer looking fonts in emacs on ubuntu (after I installed that, I really decided to give emacs a go):
http://peadrop.com/blog/2007/01/06/pretty-emacs/
Also, a decent Ruby mode
apt-get install ruby-elisp
Much better.
