The rage pro is a good Linux card.
Out of the box it has very good 2D performance, plus excellent XV support.
There is open source 3D acceleration available for it, but it's not included in any linux distro. The reason is that it's not secure... apparently every user can read the video data or something like that. Not really a problem for a single user box, but no linux distro would include it.
To enable it you need to compile a kernel module (easy) recompile X.org, and recompile mesa.
I built the kernel module, but didn't want to recompile X and mesa because I didn't want to mess up the RPM structure of Fedora.