Chris> When I start XEmacs on Display :0.0 without being attached Chris> to network, it halts trying to look up host Chris> "localhost.tucc.uab" ( thats what I think strace is showing Chris> ). This is probably the getaddrinfo/IPv6 breakage. Info from PROBLEMS reproduced below; does that help? (I wrote this, but I'm quoting the "trust us" part; I do not understand why a local XEmacs should be making blocking OS calls that are likely to fail for mobile hosts.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **** New problem: IPv6 CNAME lookup A newer problem is due to XEmacs changing to use the modern getaddrinfo() interface from the older gethostbyname() interface. The solution above is insufficient, because getaddrinfo() by default tries to get IPv6 information for localhost. This always involves a dns lookup to get the CNAME, and the strategies above don't work. It then falls back to IPv4 behavior. This is good[tm]; trust us. ***** Robust network case Configure your network so that there are no nameservers configured until the network is actually running. getaddrinfo() will not try to access a nameserver that isn't configured. ***** Flaky network case If you have a flaky modem or DSL connection that can be relied on only to go down whenever you want to bring XEmacs up, you need to force IPv4 behavior. Explicitly setting DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0 (or whatever is appropriate) works in most cases. If you cannot or do not want to do that, you can hard code IPv4 behavior in src/process-unix.c. This is bad[tm], on your own head be it. In the function unix_canonicalize_host_name() about ten lines down, change the statement hints.ai_family = AF_UNSPEC; to hints.ai_family = PF_INET; and rebuild XEmacs. getaddrinfo() is also called in src/sysdep.c:init_system_name() and in src/process-unix.c:unix_open_network_stream(). It should not be useful to make this change in either of those places. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."