I apologise in advance if there is an established solution to this problem out there; an hour or so with manuals/google hasn't turned anything up.
I have installed gnu emacs 23.4 on my linux system (Lubuntu), and I can run it just fine from my terminal, but I can't get it to load in gui mode. Emacs has appeared in my desktop menus but clicking it does nothing (no error messages, nothing at all, even though the command is fine if I do it manually in the terminal). Clicking 'run' and typing Emacs also gets nothing. I scoured the manual for an option to force gui mode but there doesn't appear to be one, just an opposite for forcing terminal mode (-nw).
Perhaps this has something to do with the LXDE desktop environment? (Googling various combinations of this and Lubuntu didn't turn anything up.) Or perhaps I installed it from the wrong file? I used the file `emacs-23.4.tar.gz' from http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/emacs/.
I'm sure it would work if I installed it from the package manager, but I'm doing this as something of an educational exercise in installing applications manually. Therefore it isn't urgent, but any help would be much appreciated.
Regards, Kevin Barry University of Dublin Trinity College