VICE 1.21 (and possibly earlier versions) has a slight hangup under the newest versions of libx11 that are installed under Edgy and Feisty (possibly Dapper, but I haven’t “playtested” VICE under Dapper).

For more information on the glitch, check this post on nabble.com. In short, it compiles normally but you’re left with an empty black box when you issue the x64 command.

Compyx came up with an edit that makes the VICE 1.21 source code work again; check it out here.

It’s also worth noting that VICE seems to misbehave under Compiz; I can’t vouch for that since I don’t use Compiz and only rarely use Beryl. If you’re having trouble with Compiz and VICE, that might be the reason.