RE: [h-e-w] Emacs failing to start

[Francis Wright]

Maybe emacs can’t find its lisp directory. There should be a directory called “lisp” under “emacs-23.1” and at the same level as “bin”, and it should contain a lot of .el and .elc files and 20 subdirectories also containing such files.

 

I have used the built-in zip facilities in Windows since the release of Windows XP to unpack emacs and that has always worked fine for me.

 

Francis

 

From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Troy Daniels
Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 3:37 AM
To: address@hidden
Subject: [h-e-w] Emacs failing to start

 

I'm trying to get emacs to work on a laptop.  I'm running Windows XP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 3, with a Pentium M 2.13 GHz processor and 2 GB of ram.

I have downloaded emacs-23.1-bin-i386.zip from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-23.1-bin-i386.zip.  I have cygwin installed, and updated a few minutes ago.  I extracted the zip file to ~/emacs/emacs-23.1.

cd ~/emacs/emacs-23.1/bin
./emacs -version

works:

$ ./emacs -version
GNU Emacs 23.1.1
Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GNU Emacs comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You may redistribute copies of Emacs
under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING.

If I try to start emacs from a bash shell

$ ./emacs

it hangs.  No window appears; I also do not get the "in-tty" version in the bash window.  The process shows up in the task manager, but does not use any CPU.  It uses about 3Mb of memory.

$ ./runemacs.exe

gives me a new prompt almost immediately, but no emacs window.  An emacs process does not show up in the task manager.

I've downloaded the zip several times, with similar results.

When I open the zip file with 7-Zip 4.65, it claims that the unpacked size of the file is the same size as reported by ls for the disk file, so there probably isn't a problem with the newlines being stripped.

To check if it's a cygwin problem, I double clicked on emacs.exe and runemacs.exe from Windows Explorer.  emacs.exe gave me a typical windows command window (like when you run a batch file), but no further output or emacs windows.  runemacs did not create any windows.

C-c, C-z and C-g had no effect on a shell that was hung running emacs.  I had to kill the process from the Task Manager to get back to a prompt.

$ ./emacs -nw

also hangs in the same manner as ./emacs.

cmdproxy and emacsclient from the same directory seem to work.  (Emacsclient obviously doesn't do much, since there is no emacs running a server, but it prints an error message about no socket or alternate editor.)  hexl also appears to work.

Does anybody have any idea what the problem might be?

Troy