John,
At this time I have 20.4.00-1 installed and running. I'd be reasonably happy with this, in spite of the loss of colour cycling and some strange key assignments, if I could find, or simulate, an sstools.ini file.
You aren't going to be able to color cycle unless your X-server is using only 256 colors. Sorry, I don't know enough to be able to fix this.
I am told that my initial colour problem was caused "because Xfractint can't find the sstools.ini file or the default map file". I'm not surprised that Xfractint can't find the sstools.ini file... neither can I! I don't believe that the packages I've tried include such an animal. If I manually navigate to a par which includes the colors, all is well. Beyond that I'm "sstools-less".
Hmm... Using the same version you are (20.4.00-1), this doesn't seem to work as it should. It should be possible to create a text file named sstools.ini and put it in a directory that xfractint can find. However, I can't determine where this would be. I thought it would be either in the directory from which you run the executable (your home directory), in the directory in which the executable resides (/usr/bin), or in the directory where the map & hlp files reside (/usr/share/xfractint). But, in this case, nothing works.
I am also told that "the latest developer's version installs the sstools.ini file in /usr/share/xfractint and the map, par, frm, ... files in the applicable subdirectories". Well, sstools isn't there, and please don't tell this newbie that files are in "the applicable subdirectories". :-)
I do understand the difficulty with compiling source packages. Every time I change or update distributions I have to figure out which applications I need to re-install to get xfractint to compile. The reason you aren't seeing any of the applicable subdirectories (assuming you have downloaded the developer's version source) is that you haven't run "make install". Doing this in Kubuntu is not all that easy or obvious. Every time I what to do something as root, I have to hunt for the magic shortcut that allows it. I hope to have removed the requirement to install as root before I release the next patch. Which should be soon. I am done with the fixes for saving map names when color cycling, but now need to look at the palette editor.
Does xfractint really use an sstools.ini file? Does Linux recognize .ini files in "the applicable directory"? I know, I know... I should compile source packages, but I can't - yet. I need the spoonfeeding which is provided by a package manager.
Yes, xfractint really does use an sstools.ini file. Linux has nothing to do with being able to find .ini files. Jonathan