I recently compiled R14B04 version of Erlang OTP suite and tried to make it work with Distel (current trunk version). Pretty good how-to is described on Clemensont’s blog but still had two major problems with Erlang/Distel/Emacs24 combo:

* Connect to node (C-c C-d n) and node-ping (C-c C-d g) 
  would always result in message “nodedown”
* (after first one is fixed): Sometimes when adding breakpoint 
  I would get a message “Module is not interpreted, can’t set breakpoints”

Solutions are as follows:

“Nodedown” problem

This message indicated that Emacs is unable to connect to inferior Erlang process. This is a well known problem of Distel/Erlang for versions of Erlang starting from R14. I downloaded the patch from Ralfs post and applied it to Distel epmd.el file. Now I can correctly connect to Erlang node.

“Module is not interpreted, can’t set breakpoints” problem

This is also Distel issue (so it seems). Fortunately, there is a simple workaround – when this message appears do the following:

* C-c C-d m (opens the monitor buffer)
* k (kills the monitor buffer)
* C-c C-d i (start interpreting) in the .erl buffer will now work.

That’s it.