Copied the text files from source .zip to the unzipped folder where lottoshares-qt was built.
The don't have to be in the hidden ~/.lottoshares

Seems to be working now.. great.

Sounds like you might be running into a memory problem - the genesis block is big . . maybe adding more memory would help.

That could be,  I have 2 GB though.  Other clients (dogecoin, litecoin, bitcoin) compile and run fine..
Maybe this requires more?

Edit: actually I have 2 GB..  thought I only had 1

All I get now is "Segmentation Fault"  -  I'm now trying to compile with the .zip source file under releases.

And everything looks fine in debug.log.. 
but it just ends at "Initializing Databases..."

I tried copying those text files to all kinds of places, (./lottoshares ./lottoshares/src ./lottoshares/database and a bunch of folders when I compiled) seems to make no difference.

Edit: 

strace shows that it looks like its trying to open "bitcoin.txt"
then sigsegv pops up  {si_signo=SIGSEGV, si_code=SEGV_MAPERR, si_addr=0}
and  +++killed by SIGSEGV +++


Any other suggestions?

Thanks

I keep getting this message when trying to run ./lottoshares-qt
I pulled with git ,  ran qmake and make..

error:
bool InitBlockIndex(): Assertion `block.hashMerkleRoot == merklerootGenesisBlock' failed.
Aborted (core dumped)

In debug.log it says there is a bunch of text files (ie. bitcoin.txt dogecoin.txt) required for airdrop not found.

I'm compiling on linux mint 17 and I also tried on another computer with xubuntu 14.04 and get the same results.

Any ideas how to fix this?

Thanks.