The main part is, of course, a computer with at least one USB port and a Wacom Graphire USB tablet.
I've used the latest development kernel for my installation : linux-2.3.99-pre6. It's quite stable and has all the necessary features. You can also find some downports, which are patches for old 2.2.x kernels. You can find all the infos on the backport at http://www.suse.cz/development/usb-backport
For the Linux console, the only program you need is gpm, available at ftp://ftp.prosa.it/pub/gpm
For having all the abilities of your tablet, you'll need to use XInput. More specifically you'll need the xf86Wacom.so module (that is shipped with the most recent versions of XFRee86 starting from 3.3.5). Alternately, you may need the xf86WacomUSB.so, which is a work-in-progress of adapting the original xf86Wacom.so to use the USB. I'll speak of it later in this document.
The applications supporting XInput are :