Re: getting gnu emacs to run in gui mode

[Ian Barton <lists@wilkesley.net>]

On 21/03/12 12:45, Kevin Patrick Barry wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> I apologise in advance if there is an established solution to this
> problem out there; an hour or so with manuals/google hasn't turned
> anything up.
>
> I have installed gnu emacs 23.4 on my linux system (Lubuntu), and I can
> run it just fine from my terminal, but I can't get it to load in gui
> mode.  Emacs has appeared in my desktop menus but clicking it does
> nothing (no error messages, nothing at all, even though the command is
> fine if I do it manually in the terminal).  Clicking 'run' and typing
> Emacs also gets nothing.  I scoured the manual for an option to force
> gui mode but there doesn't appear to be one, just an opposite for
> forcing terminal mode (-nw).
>
> Perhaps this has something to do with the LXDE desktop environment?
> (Googling various combinations of this and Lubuntu didn't turn anything
> up.)  Or perhaps I installed it from the wrong file?  I used the file
> `emacs-23.4.tar.gz' from http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/.
>
> I'm sure it would work if I installed it from the package manager, but
> I'm doing this as something of an educational exercise in installing
> applications manually.  Therefore it isn't urgent, but any help would be
> much appreciated.
>

Assuming you have all the required packages installed (try apt-get 
build-dep emacs) try the following:

make distclean
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --sysconfdir=/etc --libexecdir=/usr/lib 
\ --with-x-toolkit=gtk --with-xft

make
make install

I haven't built emacs on Ubuntu for a while, but this used to work for 
me (I am still using the same on Arch).

Ian.