I have observed a bug on a debian box where gcompris was started fine but nothing displayed (no icons) It comes from the libpng that was present with 2 versions on his box (release 1.2 and 2) To fix it, you can do : LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libpng.so.2.1.0.12 gcompris In the menu Thank Olivier Berger for the tip. Bruno.