Dotpups.de don't work in 2.17.1 on USB flash drive

[kombucha]

Hi,
I just installed about a dozen new programs from dotpups.de, and many of them aren't working in my Puppu 2.17.1 flash-drive setup. Most didn't show up in the applications menu, and some did until a restart. A few work, such as GTKSpades and the 3DCC. Celestia shows me its interface selector, but doesn't work beyond that. Pidgin and Freeciv do nothing. LinCity turns the screen black and then exits. Wesnoth works, but very poorly (hangs frequently). BillardGL was installed to a "DotPups" application folder, at the very top of the list. Any ideas why this went so poorly, or what I can do to fix these issues? OpenGL and DRI are installed and working well with my Radeon 9000 (r200 driver). I'm using JWM and occasionally E17.
Thanks!

EDIT: Thanks for the title edit

[muggins]

if you try running the respective executables in a console window on commandline, what sort of error messages are generated?

[kombucha]

Heh - I certainly should have thought of that. I'll try that out tomorrow. Thanks for the tip (and making me feel foolish )

[kombucha]

That was certainly a good start.

Pidgin needed a newer gstreamer, which I installed and now it runs well.

BillardGL needed libstd, and I got that to run but it crashes when I try to change the resolution (I don't care too much, at least it worked).

I installed mesa and some more GL stuff, and now Celestia runs fine.

FreeCiv apparently can't run as root - how can I fix that? Is there like an anti-sudo?

LinCity still just turns the screen black, and crashes the computer.