John,
Hey! Riko Voipio's xfractint version 20.4.00-1 is up and running in my Ubuntu computer. Don't know what I was doing wrong in my earlier attempts... might be as simple as which screen I had the focus on. Anyway I have only one problem left, (other than cleanup of my manual installation). My colours are all in the blue and green end of the spectrum. Got to investigate that, otherwise all looks good.
Turns out I have this version installed, also. I don't use it, though. The problem you are seeing is caused because Xfractint can't find the sstools.ini file or the default map file. The logic in the developer's version is a little smarter in this regard. But, since I generally run from the same directory I compile from, I'm not sure it would make any difference once Xfractint is installed. I'll have to look into it. Jonathan