I use Debian Squeeze (testing at time of writing) and for Latex work my setup is:
Kile – for the main coding
LatexDraw – for graphs.
Once I am happy with the drawing in LatexDraw, I take the code and paste it in Kile.
Then: Alt+2 (latex to dvi) , Alt+4 (dvi to ps), Alt+8 (ps to pdf) and Alt+7 to view the pdf.