obscurity <obscurity(a)obscure.org&gt; writes: Well, feel free to mail me seperately. It makes refering to you just a tad more complicated. At least your mail doens't bounce :-). Anyway back to the real issues. I meant compiling without GPM support. However I think this already confirms my hunch it is related to GPM. I think I know how to fix the crash (could you try to use the (untested) patch at the end?). But to fix the real problem is harder. We simply should not close the GPM connection when there are still linux consoles open. This would require some kind of reference counting or scanning all the consoles for open connection No it is not supposed to do that. I think it is another bug, unrelated to this. I cannot reproduce that however. Can you with "xemacs -vanilla"? Jan P.S. Here is the patch. Index: event-Xt.c =================================================================== RCS file: /usr/CVSroot/XEmacs/xemacs-20/src/event-Xt.c,v retrieving revision 1.42 diff -u -u -r1.42 event-Xt.c --- event-Xt.c 1998/07/28 06:25:18 1.42 +++ event-Xt.c 1999/04/07 01:57:53 ＠＠ -2035,7 +2035,7 ＠＠ /* On a stream device (ie: noninteractive), bad things can happen. */ if (EQ (CONSOLE_TYPE (con), Qtty)) { mousefd = CONSOLE_TTY_MOUSE_FD (con); - if (mousefd >= 0) { + if (mousefd >= 0 && filedesc_to_what_closure[mousefd] ) { unselect_filedesc (mousefd); } } This code reflects this comment in event-Xt somewhat above it. mousefd = CONSOLE_TTY_MOUSE_FD (con); /* We check filedesc_to_what_closure[fd] here because if you run ** XEmacs from a TTY, it will fire up GPM, select the mouse fd, then ** if you run gnuattach to connect to another TTY, it will fire up ** GPM again, and try to reselect the mouse fd. GPM uses the same ** fd for every connection apparently, and select_filedesc will ** fail its assertion if we try to select it twice. */ -- Jan Vroonhof http://www.math.ethz.ch/~vroonhof/ Mathematik, vroonhof ＠ math.ethz.ch HG E16, ETH-Zentrum, Tel: +41-1-6325456/25154 Raemistrasse 101, CH-8092 Zuerich. Fax: +41-1-6321085