still crashes when i launch from gui. but thanks for the tip for fixing pyside! nothing to do with the config file i think because i already had the config file from a previous version of gngeo-gui. i was just testing to see if the config file version was incompatible with this version of gngeo-gui and if that could be the cause of the segfault.
sudo gainroot chown user:users /home/user/.gngeo-gui chown user:users /home/user/.gngeo-gui/gngeo-gui.cfg