John,
I found that I had been installing from "Desktop" instead of "home". This time I corrected that, and started with the scrolling screen. I was now able to use "t" to select a fractal type, draw a fractal and zoom into it, all in polychrome.
If the sstools.ini file were being found, you wouldn't start at the scrolling credits screen. No, you don't need to edit out the other entries.
I still had to go through the "sudo apt-get install xfractint" routine in response to a "not installed" message. I didn't touch Makefile, but I *did* edit out all references to other than xfractint in the sstools.ini file, (if that makes any difference).
This means you are reinstalling version 20.4-01 each time. To compile the source for the developer's version, use the following from the read.me file provided with the source. Although, that does seem the wrong place to keep it. ******* Download the source tarball (for example: xfractint-20.04p07.tar.gz), put it in your home directory, and untar it with the command: tar -xzf xfractint-20.04p07.tar.gz This will create the directory xfractint-20.04p07 containing the source. You might want to change the directory name to xfractint for convenience. You will need to have gcc, ncurses, and ncurse-develop installed. You also need the XFree86-libs package installed for the X11 libraries. This package should already be installed, but if it isn't and your distribution doesn't have it, then you need the XFree86-devel package. The Makefile is set up for my convenience, so if you want to put files in different directories, you will need to change the SRCDIR setting. Otherwise, just run "make" from the source directory and it should compile. Run ./xfractint to start it up. Or, run "make install" to be able to run xfractint from anywhere. ******* Jonathan