One thing that used to be a problem with blender in linux is the lack of accelerated drivers.
I haven't kept up with this, but when I used Suse (9.?) there was one available. But it wasn't installed when the system was first set up.  I had to download it from the ATI (the other major graphics chip mfg is Nvidia) site.  This may have changed; I've read that binaries are now pretty generally available. But if you load blender and it runs slooooow.  That's probably your problem.