I downloaded and installed the Schism Tracker package through Synaptic from the official (default)repository for Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope
http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu
Schism Tracker refused to launch through Gnome. Going into the terminal and typing schism produced the same results but displayed a "stack smashing detected" error followed by a long list of memory addresses. I've placed the complete error message in a text file and uploaded it for further study. I'm more than happy to answer any questions to aid in troublshooting this problem.
Grifter
Please use the files from http://schismtracker.org/ – the Ubuntu package is extremely outdated. This bug was fixed a few months ago.