The programs are being spawned, but since the DISPLAY environment variable is not set, they can't open an window. When you run X programs, add `-dice-environment DISPLAY=:0.0' as an extra argument (or change DISPLAY's value to suit your setup). This should solve it. If you still have problems, avoid the automatic spawning, and write a small script to run the copies, such as the spawner script in the tests/ subdirectory.