emacs-18.59 and recent gnu/linux systems

emacs-18.59 and recent gnu/linux systems

[giacomo boffi]

has anyone succeeded in building a functional emacs-18.59 [1] on a
debian woody, with a 2.2 kernel?

i know of noah friedman's patches, but i'm unable to get a working
emacs... it fails miserably, dumping core, when it looks like it's
trying to allocate memory for screen structure

emacs uses system's malloc as i was unable to get src/malloc.c to
compile

#0  0x400c3227 in mallopt () from /lib/libc.so.6
#1  0x400c2145 in malloc () from /lib/libc.so.6
#2  0x080712f3 in xmalloc (size=452984345) at alloc.c:141
#3  0x0804a195 in make_screen_structure (empty=0) at dispnew.c:247
#4  0x0804c03a in init_display () at dispnew.c:199
#5  0x080572cf in main (argc=1, argv=0xbffffa34, envp=0xbffffa3c)
    at emacs.c:466

it's interesting that emacs -batch works nicely, e.g.,

------------------------------------------------------------------------
% cat a.el
(print (* 5 6))
% src/emacs-18.59/src/emacs-18.59.2 -batch -l a.el
Warning: lisp library (/usr/local/emacs/lisp) does not exist.
Warning: executable/documentation dir (/usr/local/emacs/etc/) does not exist.

30
% 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

i hope someone has some suggestions, tia

[1] in many respects emacs-18.59 is ideal for running calc