First of all I am thrilled to be using an SLR again, and particularly a Nikon, having been an avid amateur photography back in the chemistry days, I have just never been able to get very excited by whatever one calls the other type of digital imaging devices.
I received a D3000 on my birthday in December and am extremely happy with it's performance thus far, not so however with the computer interface. My problem is that I do not use Windows so I have been encountering problems transferring pictures from my camera.
Thus far I have not been able to get my file manager to recognize the camera, here are some errors I've been getting.

Could not open location 'gphoto2:///DCIM/100D3000/DSC_0002.JPG'
Error initializing camera: -105: Unknown model

Unable to mount NIKON DSC D3000
Error initializing camera: -60: Could not lock the device

The image manager I have is called F-Spot, it came with the O/S, the really odd thing about this is that if I plug the camera in, and leave it there for about 10 minutes, suddenly I get a message from the O/S saying basically, hey there's a camera connected, wanna use F-Spot to load the images? I say yes and that works. But the file manager still will not open the camera, it lists it, but I get one of the above error messages when I try to access it.
One suspicion I have is that the format memory card procedure may be the problem since, prior to reading anything I, of course snapped off a few pictures and had no problem uploading them.
Questions
Has anyone else had this problem?
Anyone using linux know of a good reliable image manager I could use for loading, organizing, and tagging images?

I intend to watch the rest of the digitutors I found in another thread here, looks like a great site, and I appreciate any help might be offered, Thank you