cgminer does work well for a lot of people, but if you're mining scrypt coins on your GPU then you're stuck with the 3.7.2 version (or earlier).
For me, I've had some issues with running both my R9 290's effectively under linux. So I'm hoping that sgminer may prove to be the way foward.
Since I originally started this topic thread, I've been looking at the source code in order to try and help resolve my problems. I currently believe that it's down to an AMD driver issue - but we'll have to see. Anyway, this has given me the opportunity to make my very own contributions to the project - so I'm hoping that they see the light of day in the near future!
This worked well for me. It's a re-compiled version of 3.7.0 with a patch for the r9 290 series cards.
http://www.ohmpie.com/mining-on-an-r9-290-in-linux/You might be able to review the changes the submitter made, then incorporate them into sgminer.
Before sgminer, I tried those ohmpie fixes on cgminer, and they did help.
But those changes are already incorporated into sgminer. There are other issues with the R9 290 cards, and I believe them to be driver related (and not fixed by any mining software that I know of). I think there's been a bit of a re-factoring of the code base for sgminer, which should help in the future.
