Hello, Tony, Lucien, and vimmers:
Thank you for your help! I finally found the culprit, but first:
* Lucien: I use ./vim -g when in the source directory. There's no
gvim link there; to use such a link, either I'd have to generate it by
hand or install the (IMHO) defective vim which lacked gui capability --
and I don't want a defective vim installed atop an older albeit
functioning vim/gvim.
* Tony: unfortunately I'd forgotten about config.log but it wasn't
particularly helpful on this one. I ended up putting over 60 comments
into the vim/src/auto/configure script to track down where the issue was.
I also tried --enable-gui=auto and that, too, did not work.
Well, this is a new Scientific Linux system (and a new computer, too,
actually) -- so it turns out that my configure commands
"--enable-gui=gtk2" or "--enable-gui=auto" didn't work. Turns out
that I needed --enable-gui=gtk3 -- and now I have a functioning gvim!
So, is this perhaps a bug report? ie. --enable-gui=auto should have
worked, I think.
Regards,
Chip Campbell