Hello,
I'm have a fresh 32-bit Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) install. I obtained both the 2009-01-03 and 2009-01-04 slime tarfile / cvs snapshot. Both of them exhibit the same issue. With both SBCL and CMUCL, the slime repl does not appear. The inferior lisp window is displayed. The 'connected' message, along with its jaunty colloquial appendage, shows in the mini-buffer. Sometimes I would get a swank disconnected (end of file) message on a socket, other times it appeared as if there were no error-related messages at all.
I did 'apt-get slime', pointed to that one, and it works. This is Emacs 22.2.1. I believe the apt repository's version comes from 2008-02-23.
Is the comment in that slime.el that "SLIME is compatible with GNU Emacs 20 and 21" still valid, i.e. is slime not compatible with Emacs 22? (Even if so, that doesn't explain why the apt version does work while the cvs version does not, other than that the change may have been intentional.)
Jeff