Emacs Reboot #2: Startup

After compilation completes it’s time to give the new Emacs a shot:

$ src/emacs

It starts up successfully, and makes a valiant attempt to load my existing Emacs configuration.

I notice some warnings about missing Gtk3 modules in the output:

Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "globalmenu-plugin"

The first is easy to fix:

$ sudo apt-get install libcanberra-gtk3-dev

The second I can’t find an immediate solution for so I defer it to later. The global menu is still relatively young in GNOME/GTK, so this may be something that resolves itself in the next release of Ubuntu.

The whole point of this reboot exercise is to rebuild my configuration from scratch, so I don’t want Emacs24 loading my existing configuration. I’ll put a switch in my .emacs file to redirect Emacs 24 to a different init file:

(if (< emacs-major-version 24)
    (load "~/share/.emacs23")
  (load "~/.emacs24"))

With that change (and the creation of a blank ~/.emacs24), I’ve got a vanilla Emacs 24:

Everything looks good, so I’ll install it to /usr/local:

$ sudo make install

3 comments

  1. Thanks for writing up this series!

    One other thing I did was I then renamed the binary to emacs24 from emacs (locate *emacs to find it) and linked emacs to emacs23 to keep the old version while I set this one up.

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