I’m using Ubunutu 14.04, and I installed Renoise.
when I click the icon for Renoise, however, nothing happens.
Could it be a problem with jack or alsa maybe? I’m using an extremely old laptop, btw.
Make sure you’re using the correct architecture (32 or 64 bit): If this is a 64 bit Linux, make sure you’ve downloaded/installed the 64bit version of Renoise too.
If this is not the problem, do you get any output/error in the terminal when launching renoise?
What taktik said–try starting Renoise from the terminal and see what error messages it fails on.
One thing that I’ve experienced occasionally, on a Linux system that I just installed a fresh Renoise, but one that already had a lot of audio packages installed (because it was KX Studio, for instance), was that Renoise sometimes fails initializing certain LADSPA or other audio plugins. It seems that when Renoise encounters such an error during startup, it marks the first plugin it fails on as “bad”, then exits, and will skip it on next launch. Sometimes it takes two or three false starts before Renoise has marked all “bad” plugins and is able to fully launch. If you run Renoise from the terminal you can keep an eye on what’s going on during startup.