I kissed Micro$oft goodbye the other day, and am now running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackelope) on my two-year old, vanilla Dell laptop.
I tried installing and running Septerra Core under WINE tonight, and it looks, sounds, and runs GREAT... better than it EVER did under Vista!
Looking forward to trying out all my other GOG purchases in the near future. All indications at the moment seem to point to a rosy future for my favorite old games under Linux!!
If you want to give this a try, feel free to post a reply... I'd be happy to offer some advice on getting things up and running for you.

We've been building quite a list of games already: GOG Games that are working fine with Linux/ Wine
Also, any games that aren't listed there can probably be found in Wine's Application Database.

Absolutely excellent! Thank you for mentioning this. I too try to run my older games with WINE and found Septerra Core very functional, but I will be surely keeping tabs on this thread.