Hi, I've had a bit of a search around for this problem, but I couldn't find any answers. If I didn't look hard enough, feel free to redirect me to the solution! :)
Anyway, I've installed kdenlive from the repositories on a pretty fresh Xubuntu 11.10 system, solved the SDL module problem and the program still won't start. It gets a little further - it asks me all the configuration questions, but when I hit "finish" the program simply bombs out. A user in another thread (http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/ubuntu-1110-wont-run-kdenlive-mlts-sdl-module-not-found) was able to solve the problem by using the svn version, but it didn't do the trick for me unfortunately.
Can anyone help me?

Okay, I've just gotten the program to work by simply copying the exact command line from my launcher into the shell "kdenlive %i -caption "%c" %u"
I know, the %i, %c and %u are wrong, but I just wanted to see if it would give me some error messages in the shell that I could work with. Instead it gave me a GUI error message "~/%i is not a Kdenlive project file" (surprise surprise). So I can open the program through a shell, but it still won't open through the launcher, and I'm sure I'm going to be missing some important paramaters if I keep running it through the shell. Besides, it would be a real pain to have to run it through shell every time.
edit: just tried to create a new project and it bombed again witht the message kdenlive: symbol lookup error: kdenlive: undefined symbol: mlt_service_cache_get_size" in my shell.

Okay, just searched that string and came up with the solution. Turns out I had to upgrade libmlt4 and melt. Funny, because elsewhere i read that the upgraded versions were supposed to come with the svn version which I am using.
So yeah, feel free to ignore this thread!