Thanks for your input Gaieus. My observation with Sketchup in Ubuntu Koala with Wine 1.2 is very good speed using Nvidia drivers, so it must be using openGL natively. But you have a point because trying to make a raster export is disastrous. But working within Linux without doing that is snappy,apart from a garbled start screen. What I was thinking of was a Sketchup Linux written for Debian or Red Hat which has a large user base. Recently, Bricscad released a full Linux version of their CAD application and it is pretty impressive. Snappier than in Wine.

A real honest to goodness Linux Sketchup. I mean, why insist that we run it in Wine when usability is severely hampered. Please?