I'm using Inkscape 0.46 in Ubuntu 9.04 and on a laptop with a 14 inch screen. I can't see enough of the Y-axis ruler down the left side of the canvas to read the numbers and see the ruler scale properly. I can just see enough of it to drag a guideline out onto the canvas. It's a problem just on this laptop or under Ubuntu as I don't have this problem on my work PC which runs Windows XP and has a larger screen.

Have you tried the development version? It has been improved. You can try prebuilt dev packages http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php ... mmended.29