I’ve had this problem before, but never wrote down how I fixed it. emacs would whine about not being able to open a termcap database file, and wouldn’t start on the console. The X version worked fine, but using the -nw option resulted it in dying. The fix! infocmp -C rxvt-unicode | sudo tee /etc/termcap If you strace emacs when you start it, you’ll see it tries to open that file, which doesn’t exist on Ubuntu by default...