my friend and i have both encountered this in different operating systems for different software.
his, on NOP 4.2 (puppy ftnitk), attempting to install FSlint from a .tar.gz, pet getted gz2pet.
mine, crunchbanglinux, after attempting source and other methods, got ggseq (gungirl audio sequencer) installed and recognized in package manager after using alien on an rpm compatable with my architechture, but just the same doesnt start.

can anyone provide some tips and pointers as to where and what we should be looking into to suss the problem, what kinds of things we could check... ?


many thanks.

I'm still fairly new to Linux myself but I've found that this is usually down to missing dependencies for the particular application.
I'm not overly familiar with either of your 2 distros but I did try Puppy on my laptop and I'm sure that one of the application search facilities included does list the dependencies required.
Check this out using Wiki or similar and once you've installed them you should (hopefully) solve the problem.