I originally wrote an article on how to map a network drive using Ubuntu. Since then things have really changed in the Linux desktop world. Gnome 3 has been released and Ubuntu has moved away from Gnome and switched to Unity as their primary desktop environment.
A while back decided to pull gimp out of the default install to make sure the install .ISO file would fit on a cd. You now need to install this if you would like to take advantage of this great tool.