rip dvds and subtitles in ubuntu (not relevant here)

A method to rip DVDs and subtitles that worked for me (Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 running on dv2000t):

1) get dvd::rip and dependencies: instructions
2) open the dvd using the dvdrip GUI program - rip dvd and then encode into avi files using default settings. this will take many hours.
3) run ksubtitleripper, open all the vob files (large relevant ones) and click 'extract subtitles'. this step will fill your directory with pgm files and will create one srtx file.
4) convert the pgm files to txt files using pgm2txt
if the name of your srtx file is sub.srtx then this will work:
pgm2txt sub
5) using srttool, combine the txt files via the srtx file into one srt subtitle file
srttool -s -w < sub.srtx > sub.srt
for steps 4 and 5 refer to last portion of this link

Or simply go to opensubtitles.org and download the srt file :D