I recently updated to OS X 10.4 and both xemacs and slime stopped working. I've tracked down my troubles and thought I would pass them along in the hopes of saving someone else trouble.

The first problem was that xemacs (21.4.17) would exit during startup. The 10.4 X11 implementation does not like this:

device-x.c line 505:

/* Get a dll handle to the main process. */ dll_handle xaw_dll_handle = dll_open (NULL);

To fix, change to:

/* Get a dll handle to the main process. */ dll_handle xaw_dll_handle = dll_open ("");

After I got xemacs working, slime failed at startup with:

itimer "run-with-timer" signaled: (error "127.0.0.1/\220^YFe No address associated with nodename")

The backend lisp starts correctly and writes the handshake data correctly, but xemacs cannot resolve the local host to finish the connection.

This appears to be a compiler issue with gcc in 10.4, if you configure xemacs with:

./configure --cflags="-g"

Slime will once again be able to connect.

James M