i have to spend a good two hours with each cd manually typing up all the tag information by hand, on my linux 9.0 notebook, from the cd inlay card! this includes: track name, artist, cd number, year of release, album name etc, etc ... none of this is inserted whenever i rip ... all i get is track 1 ... track 2 ... track 3 ... etc.

surely all this information should be automatically read, as it is on itunes, for instance.

I don't see why amarok should do that. There are like a dozen of good programs that rip your music and tag it automatically.

My preferred method is using some generic ripping mechanism to generate the mp3 and then use MusicBrainz Picard on it.
Just load all the files (mp3/ogg/..) from your CD into picard, do a CD lookup while having your CD in your drive and then move these files over to the disc found. You can also do automatic renaming and move the files to artist/album directories or similar.

If you have KDE correctly configured with cddb lookup, AND the CD you are ripping is in that database, AND you are using Amarok to copy the tracks to your system via the Files Browser, then the information should be fetched automatically. If you are not using KDE, you can still configure this by running kcontrol (if it's installed) and checking the  cdrom settings under "Peripherals".
Bear in mind though, that Amarok is not specifically a CD ripping app - it merely uses KDE's tools.