I noticed that the add and delete button of editor->abbreviations are missing. I do not know in which revision it disappeared but in one of the old revision e.g. svn 3989 the buttons are present.
They are not missing. Just resize the window (increase it's height) until the buttons become visible.
There are several other discrepancies in
Settings > Editor window.
I think i'll fill a bug on this...
Please don't file a bug report. This is a well-known problem with wxGTK < 2.8.4. None of us will be able to reproduce it and it may be marked as invalid.
Couple of weeks back someone had this same problem and it was found that his/her pc was not upgraded to wx-2.8.4 through apt-update. I would suggest you to uninstall any existing wx versions, then manually clean up any wx libraries remaining in your system. Then compile/install wxGTK-2.8.4. That should solve your problem.
I have multiple Linux Virtual Machines (including Fedora 7, Ubuntu 7.04, Ubuntu 7.10-Alpha 3, PCBSD-1.3, etc) and I often test C::B source for any errors on them. Till date C::B+wxGTK-2.8.4 have no such start-up issue (except on Ubuntu-7.10-Alpha 1 or 2).
Best Regards,
Biplab