Sodipodi is a vector-based drawing package for GNOME.
It is similiar in style with Corel Draw!, and seems to be nicely thought out and can make fairly pretty pictures. It saves and loads SVG files.
However, it's still in alpha stage, and crashes a lot (at least for me) and it doesn't seem to do the SVG thing properly, either - either the other programs don't understand it or the other programs don't understand the format... You may want to look at Sketch meanwhile.
Home page: http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/