You know, not only is everything working perfectly in this install of the pinball game [Maciuszek knows what he is doing!], but the game actually performs better than it ever has in any other distro![Yay, Slackware!]- e.g. I'll often play it while listening to lectures on Youtube; In Debian, doing both at the same time would slow the game down to the point of being unusable; In Crunchbang, it was barely usable; being a little slow and jerky; but in Slackware, it works perfectly, no matter what I have running in the background.

Or could it be that I don't have Flash installed in Slackware; whereas I had it in all the other distros- and maybe it was robbing performance?

Anywho, I've got my email and everything set-up, and as of yesterday, Slackware is now my official primary OS! I had really installed Slackware as a learning experience/something to fool around/experiment with- but I guess the old saying is true: Once you Slack, you never go back! Crunchbang is a fine OS, too- and has the advantage of having access to the humongous Debian repos, plus more; but I dunno- Slackware is just so "clean" and...and...[liberating? Unfettered?] (well, you guys know!)

And I guess, between learning from Maciuszek's example in this thread, and deb2tgz, I could also swipe anything I may need from the Debian repos[?]!

Thanks again, to you all. I've bookmarked this thread, and in the future will be going through the wealth of references you all have provided.