Run 23 in the background in GNOME?

[Marc Schwartz <marc_schwartz@comcast.net>]

Hi all,

Been running 23 from CVS for some time. First, great work to all the
devs!

This weekend, I decided to alter my modus operandi, such that Emacs
would be loaded at my login to GNOME and then enable me to run
emacsclient to speed up the loading and editing of subsequent
files. BTW, this is on Fedora 9.

Based upon entries in the Wiki and others that I found via Google, I
enable the server in ~/.emacs and have set my default editor in .bashrc
to a modification/simplification of the emacs.bash script for 23, that I
put into ~/bin/emacs23, which is run at login.

This is working great, with one exception. When I run Emacs at login, I
use the --iconic argument, so that the Emacs window is not displayed on
the desktop. There are times however, when I accidentally click on the
Emacs icon on the dock (Avant-Window-Navigator), bringing up the window
and then subsequently close it, losing the advantage of the
server/emacsclient combination. Yeah, I know....stop doing that...  :-)

I have tried various incantations of running Emacs in the background
(using &), both as part of a startup session in the GUI and from bash,
without success. In checking for the presence of /tmp/emacs${UID}/server
or ${HOME}/.emacs_server in the emacs23 script, I cannot seem to get it
to stick reliably, while keeping Emacs in the background, so that it
does not show up on the desktop at all, even iconized. I have also
attempted to use the window settings in Compiz-Fusion to have the
initial iconized Emacs session skip the taskbar, as an alternative,
without success however.

Anyone have any ideas/suggestions to get Emacs to run at login, while
not showing up on the desktop or the taskbar, so that it is effectively
invisible as a user, thus enabling me to consistently use emacsclient
for all subsequent operations?

Thanks in advance.

Marc Schwartz