Okay, I installed Debian 9.8 into a VirtualBox VM and with a little tinkering the qt linux wallet is running. Something about Ubuntu that the wallet doesn't like.

We'll see how it does.  I've mined three blocks running the Windows wallet using PlayOnLinux on a 5 year-old Dell i7 laptop, so I can't complain.

BTW... any chance of a ARM Raspberry pi friendly version in the future?  You could make an image with a working wallet installed, so that people could literally flash their microSD card, boot the Pi and start mining immediately.