I thought I'd resurrect this thread as I had a similar problem.
Gcompris installation would fail without reporting why (no I don't know how to look up error reports). Turns out it was the lack of OGG support. I installed OGG from here. and then was able to install Gcompris without a problem.

A lot of other apps use the OGG and include it in their download, so many users won't notice this dependency unless they try to install Gcompris as one of the first things like I did, or install a conflicting package like max did. ( I actually went looking for the OGG download and installed Quake instead, when I made it back to OGG it was already installed.