John,
After running through your outlined procedure, I got a message saying "xfractint not installed" Use "sudo apt-get install xfractint". I did this and tried to run... and it worked. However, the scrolling screen was missing and I went straight into rendering the test Mandel. This is another "blue end" spectrum type.
Something's still not right with my folders, and/or the placement of sstools, as I must use two shift-6's to get into the directory containing the pars. I'm trying to discover where sstools should be to stop this.
There doesn't seem to be a way to get that version of Xfractint (20.4-01) to find the sstools.ini file. One of the problems with the installation used by the Ubuntu distribution is that all the files get installed as the root user. This makes it difficult to change them. And, since Xfractint isn't being run as the root user, it won't be able to save files to the directories the installation created. I'll try again. I may have just not set the file permissions correctly. Jonathan