OK, it seems like a week or so, but I got back to Buenos Aires on Friday, at three o'clock in the morning.
Since then, I have had a welcome back asado with my family, have (wiping a tear from my eye) wiped out Slackware on my AMD64/SATA wonderbox (after a suitable dvdbackup), and put up a spanking new Ubuntu desktop. Got the nvidia card drivers in through synaptic (nvidia-glx – by the way don't forget that nvidia-settings is a broken package, it is actually installed automatically by nvidia-glx, just install the latter and you can do <alt-F2> and just run nvidia-settings)