This really isn't a bug or report of a problem. I'm just writing this to start a thread for people trying to install and run Alice on Ubuntu 8.10.
I have a Lenovo T61 Thinkpad. In the past I have had Alice run on Ubuntu, but there were glitches. In particular, the graphics were not rendered properly on certain 3D models (while about half of them looked just fine). Also, it would simply refuse to start at times.
I just did a fresh install of Ubuntu 8.10 and copied over my alice folder from a flash drive. When I tried to run alice, I got only error messages, mostly from the python file not be able to import the string module.
However, I downloaded Alice 2.0 and put it in a folder in my home directory. I deleted my old folder. I right clicked on it and chose "extract here". After the new Alice folder was created, I clicked into the Required folder and found the "run-alice" file. Clicking on it brought up "run in terminal", which I chose. Alice ran perfectly and there are none of the 3D rendering glitches that it suffered in earlier Ubuntu versions.
The nice thing here was that I never had to use the command line. Although I love to use the command line in Linux, my students that use Ubuntu are not big fans of using the command prompt.