Binary package hint: emacs23
One of the best new features in emacs23 is "--daemon". An emacs daemon can persist as long as you want, across login sessions. However, this doesn't work well in Karmic because of two issues:
1. The XAUTHORITY environment variable changes with every login session, so when you log in a second time the daemon is using a stale value and cannot open new windows. I tried to work around this by using "M-x setenv" from within emacs, but apparently emacs doesn't reread the environment (strace shows it still trying to open the old path).
2. Gnome complains that emacs is still running when you log out. (Yes, of course it's still running, that's the point.) This is just a minor annoyance, you can ignore the warning and it doesn't cause further problems.
ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Sun Nov 15 22:59:17 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release i386 (20091028.5)
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: emacs23 23.1+1-4ubuntu3
ProcEnviron:
PATH=(custom, user)
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: emacs23
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic is now end of life. Please upgrade and report back if this bug still is there in newer versions of Ubuntu.