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[bpt/emacs.git] / etc / PROBLEMS
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1This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
3
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4* Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
5
6This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
7of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
8version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
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9dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
10around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
11incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
12". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
13directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
14variables).
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15
16The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
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17`-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
18when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
19unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
20run the script like this:
21
173de997 22 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
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23
24(replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
25the script).
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26
27Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
28Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
29
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30* Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
31
32Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
33version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
34necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
35__MSVCRT__, like so:
36
37 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
38
39* Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
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40
41The error message might be something like this:
42
43 Converting d:/emacs-21.1/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
44 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
45 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
46 '0xffffffff'
47 Stop.
48
49This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
50which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
51`*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
52endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
53or EOL conversions.
54
55The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
56change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
57in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
58which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
59mangling them.
60
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61* Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
62
63The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
64C backtrace printed by GDB:
65
66 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
67 (gdb) where
68 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
69 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
70 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
71 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
72
73This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
74of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
75but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
76other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
77distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
78GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
79following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
80distribution:
81
cbfe0252 82 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
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83 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
84 know what's really going on here. */
85 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
86 0x10000000. */
87 #if defined __linux__
88 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
89 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
90 #endif
91 #endif
92 #endif /* 0 */
93
94Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
95the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
96should now succeed.
97
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98* JPEG images aren't displayed.
99
100This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
101Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem.
102
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103* Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
104
105This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
106defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
107patch to assert.h should solve this:
108
109*** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
110--- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
111***************
112*** 41,47 ****
113 /*
114 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
115 */
116! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
117
118 #else /* debugging enabled */
119
120--- 41,47 ----
121 /*
122 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
123 */
124! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
125
126 #else /* debugging enabled */
127
128
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129
130* Improving performance with slow X connections
131
132If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
133language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by
134configuring Emacs with option `--without-xim'. Configuring Emacs
135without XIM does not affect the use of Emacs' own input methods, which
136are part of the Leim package.
137
138If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
139switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
140
141* Getting a Meta key on the FreeBSD console
142
143By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
144FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
145current keymap to a file with the command
146
147 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
148
149Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
150definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
151key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
152to look like this
153
154 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
155
156to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
157
158 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
159
160* Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
161
162A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
163into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
164incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
165other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
166been filed.
167
168* Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font
169
170This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
1712.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
172event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
173Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
174
175A workaround for this is to add something like
176
177emacs.waitForWM: false
178
179to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
180frame's parameter list, like this:
181
182 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
183
184(this should go into your `.emacs' file).
185
186* Underlines appear at the wrong position.
187
188This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
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189Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
190neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
191problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
192`.emacs'.
193
194To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
195type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
196property.
61638355 197
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198* When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
199click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
200is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
201problem disappears.
202
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203* There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
204XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
205one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
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206For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
207"C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
208used with neXtaw at run time.
209
210The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
211want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
212built Emacs with.
ed0d1d91 213
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214* Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
215
216This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
217a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
218--without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
219
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220* Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
221
222This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
223terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
224If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
225version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
226and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
227
228All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
229problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
230terminfo when built.
231
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232* Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
233
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234Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
235emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
236entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
237"Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
238supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
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239Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
240uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
241"colors".
242
243In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
244``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
245back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
246use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
247doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
248sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
249it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
250capability).
251
252Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
253attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
254incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
255this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
ed85f61d 256
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257Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
258of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
ed85f61d 259entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
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260`xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
261emulator.
ed85f61d 262
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263Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
264Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
265Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
266recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
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267global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
268`global-font-lock-mode'.
ed85f61d 269
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270* Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
271
272This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
273ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
274These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
275the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
276(show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
277blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
278cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
279always blinks.
280
281A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
282enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
283the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
284cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
285the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
286cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
287
288To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
289`linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
290the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
291produce a modified terminfo entry.
292
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293Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
294change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
295
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296* Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
297
298The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
299emulation for which it is set up.
300
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301Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
302Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
303On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
304--enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
305successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
306lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
307menu placement.
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308
309On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
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310locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
311what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
312developers.
339b95d5 313
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314* Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.1.
315
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316Emacs 21.1 built for MS-Windows doesn't support images and the tool bar.
317Support for these will be added in future versions.
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319Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
320is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menu items is not
321displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
322synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
323waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
324pop-up menu interaction.
f936978f 325
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326There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
327mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
328frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
329after moving back into it.
b87207a0 330
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331Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
332not as severely as in 21.1.
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333
334Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
335characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
336
337An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
338Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
339
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340Windows 2000 input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.1).
341These input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded in
342the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
343characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
344work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
345you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
346the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
347ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
348appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
349yet.)
350
351Multilingual text put into the Windows 2000 clipboard by Windows
352applications cannot be safely pasted into Emacs (as of v21.1). This
353is because Windows 2000 uses Unicode to represent multilingual text,
354but Emacs does not yet support Unicode well enough to decode it. This
355means that Emacs can only interchange non-ASCII text with other
356Windows 2000 programs if the characters are in the system codepage.
357Reportedly, a partial solution is to install the Mule-UCS package and
358set selection-coding-system to utf-16-le-dos.
359
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360* The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
361
362This can happen because the linker by default only looks for shared
363libraries, but jpeg distribution by default doesn't build and doesn't
364install a shared version of the library, `libjpeg.so'. One system
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365where this is known to happen is Compaq OSF/1 (`Tru64'), but it
366probably isn't limited to that system.
c8d9b4ee 367
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368You can configure the jpeg library with the `--enable-shared' option
369and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a shared version of libjpeg,
370which you need to install. Finally, rerun the Emacs configure script,
371which should now find the jpeg library. Alternatively, modify the
372generated src/Makefile to link the .a file explicitly.
c8d9b4ee 373
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374(If you need the static version of the jpeg library as well, configure
375libjpeg with both `--enable-static' and `--enable-shared' options.)
c8d9b4ee 376
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377* Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
378
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379This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
380(RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
381(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
382configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
383files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
384left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
385itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
cbfe0252 386Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
d9810886 387
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388In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
389machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
390(it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
391This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
392
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393If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
394(Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
395you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
396force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
397problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
398blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
399`mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
400options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
401`/etc/auto.home'.
402
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403Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
404a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
405waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
406to work around the problem.
d9810886 407
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408Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
409onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
410you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
411`/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
412
413 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
414
415The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
416
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417* Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
418
419This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
420via NFS. Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
421binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
422
423 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
424
425We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
426build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
427
9ed04369 428* Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
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429
430Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
431other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
432that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
433size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
434when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
435fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
436
437To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
438
439 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
440
441If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
442problem.
443
444The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
445`fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
446`xset fp rehash'.
447
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448* Large file support is disabled on HP-UX. See the comments in
449src/s/hpux10.h.
450
451* Crashes when displaying uncompressed GIFs with version
452libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
453
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454* Font Lock displays portions of the bufefr in incorrect faces.
455
456By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
457`{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
458any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
459vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
460parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
461in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
cbfe0252 462pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
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463introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
464through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
465to the end of a very large buffer.
466
467If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
468makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
469fontification by setting the variable
470`font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
471be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
472
473Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
474in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
475
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476* When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
477or messed up.
478
cbfe0252 479For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
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480empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
481background.
482
483This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
484definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
485solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
486option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style.
487
488Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
489applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
490(should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
491so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
492Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
493present or commented out:
494
495 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
496 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
497 Emacs*Foreground
498 Emacs*Background
499
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500* Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
501
502Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
503MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
504port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
505keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
506of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
507
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508* Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
509
510If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
511due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
512and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
513port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
514are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
515confuses ange-ftp.
516
517The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
518(version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
519Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' directory. To
520force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the variable
521`ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the client's
522executable. For example:
523
524 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
525
526If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
527this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
528
529 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
530
531
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532* The latest released version of the W3 package doesn't run properly
533with Emacs 21 and needs work. However, these problems are already
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534fixed in W3's CVS. The patch below is reported to make w3-4.0pre.46
535work.
536
537Some users report they are unable to byte-compile W3 with Emacs 21.
538If the patches below don't help to resolve your problems, install the
539CVS version of W3, which should be compatible with Emacs 21.
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540
541diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el
542--- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el Sun Nov 14 22:00:12 1999
543+++ w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el Thu Dec 14 14:59:15 2000
544@@ -181,7 +181,8 @@
545 (dispatch-event (next-command-event)))
546 (error nil))))
547 (t
548- (if (and (not (sit-for 0)) (input-pending-p))
549+ ;; modified for GNU Emacs 21 by bob@rattlesnake.com on 2000 Dec 14
550+ (if (and (not (sit-for 0)) nil)
551 (condition-case ()
552 (progn
553 (setq w3-pause-keystroke
554diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-e21.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-e21.el
555--- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-e21.el Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970
556+++ w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-e21.el Thu Dec 14 14:54:58 2000
557@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
558+;;; w3-e21.el --- ** required for GNU Emacs 21 **
559+;; Added by bob@rattlesnake.com on 2000 Dec 14
560+
561+(require 'w3-e19)
562+(provide 'w3-e21)
563
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564* On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
565are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
566so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
567Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
568
cc2f2825 569* Compiling on AIX 4.3.x or 4.4 fails.
ec383c7d 570
9e2305c3 571This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
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572the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
573redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
574is to use the default compiler `cc'.
575
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576* The PSGML package uses the obsolete variables
577`before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
9ec9d3d2 578longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
1d297d9b 579
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580* Unicode characters are not unified with other Mule charsets.
581
582As of v21.1, Emacs charsets are still not unified. This means that
583characters which belong to charsets such as Latin-2, Greek, Hebrew,
584etc. and the same characters in the `mule-unicode-*' charsets are
585different characters, as far as Emacs is concerned. For example, text
586which includes Unicode characters from the Latin-2 locale cannot be
587encoded by Emacs with ISO 8859-2 coding system; and if you yank Greek
588text from a buffer whose buffer-file-coding-system is greek-iso-8bit
589into a mule-unicode-0100-24ff buffer, Emacs won't be able to save that
590buffer neither as ISO 8859-7 nor as UTF-8.
591
592To work around this, install some add-on package such as Mule-UCS.
593
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594* Problems when using Emacs with UTF-8 locales
595
596Some systems, including recent versions of GNU/Linux, have terminals
597or X11 subsystems that can be configured to provide Unicode/UTF-8
598input and display. Normally, such a system sets environment variables
599such as LANG, LC_CTYPE, or LC_ALL to a string which ends with a
600`.UTF-8'. For example, a system like this in a French locale might
601use `fr_FR.UTF-8' as the value of LANG.
602
603Since Unicode support in Emacs, as of v21.1, is not yet complete (see
604the previous entry in this file), UTF-8 support is not enabled by
605default, even in UTF-8 locales. Thus, some Emacs features, such as
606non-ASCII keyboard input, might appear to be broken in these locales.
607To solve these problems, you need to turn on some options in your
608`.emacs' file. Specifically, the following customizations should make
609Emacs work correctly with UTF-8 input and text:
610
611 (setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
612 (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
613 (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
614 (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
615 (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
616
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617* The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
618
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619This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
620slots now. If the built-in Unicode/UTF-8 support is insufficient,
621e.g. if you need more CJK coverage, use the current Mule-UCS package.
622Any files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode won't be read
623correctly by Emacs 21.
224a0b4d 624
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625* Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
626
627The error message might be something like this:
628
629 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
630
631This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
632built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
633for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
634corrects that.
635
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636* ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
637
638This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
639defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
640runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
641
642The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
643
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644* On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
645from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
646shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
647These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
648library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
649
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650Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
651process invokes Emacs several times.
652
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653On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
654environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
655can be found.
656
657Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
658Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
659specified run-time search path in the executable.
660
661Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
662
0c6456ad 663* On Solaris 2.7, building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
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664C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
665compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
666release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
667another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
668and the default CFLAGS.
0c6456ad 669
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670* Compiling syntax.c with the OPENSTEP 4.2 compiler gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
671
672The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
673following message:
674
675 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
676
677To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
678INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
679functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
680
681 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
682 {
683 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
684 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
685
686Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
687with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
688
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689* Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
690
691A typical error message might be something like
692
693 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
694
695This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
696Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
697are:
698
699 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
700
701 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
702 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
703 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
704
705One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
706fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
707the problematic line(s) and correct them.
708
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709* Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
710
711The typical error message might be like this:
712
713 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
714
715This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
716tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
717files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
718Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
719when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
720required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
721its loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
722
723Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
724file could fail to load if it is compressed.
725
726The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
727file.
728
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729Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
730lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
731print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
732
733 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
734
735If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
736and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
737load-path.
738
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JR
739* Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
740
741An example of such an error is:
742
743 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
744
745This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your classpath.
746The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
747present in load-path:
748
749 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
750
751If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
752and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
753load-path.
754
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755* Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
756
757If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
758representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
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759ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
760version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
761systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
762ftp client. On a Debian system, type
f3d6f4ee 763
f2d176f2 764 update-alternatives --config ftp
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765
766and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
767
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768* Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
769
770The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
771work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
772was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
773work when an antivirus package is installed.
774
775The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
776mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
777or disable it entirely.
778
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779* On Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
780
781This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
782when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
783cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
cbfe0252 784http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
f29d1e75 785
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786* Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
787mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
788exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
789seen.
790
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791* After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working.
792
793This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
794Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
795modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
796keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
797modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
798was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
799Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
800
801The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
802modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
803and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
804which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
805the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
806modifier:
807
808 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
809
810A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
811is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
812
813 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
814
815This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
816keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
817keys can serve as Meta.
818
819The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
820keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
821
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822* On OSF/Dec Unix/Tru64/<whatever it is this year> under X locally or
823remotely, M-SPC acts as a `compose' key with strange results. See
824keyboard(5).
825
826Changing Alt_L to Meta_L fixes it:
827% xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L'
828% xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R'
829
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830* Error "conflicting types for `initstate'" compiling with GCC on Irix 6.
831
832Install GCC 2.95 or a newer version, and this problem should go away.
833It is possible that this problem results from upgrading the operating
834system without reinstalling GCC; so you could also try reinstalling
835the same version of GCC, and telling us whether that fixes the problem.
836
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837* Emacs dumps core on Solaris in function IMCheckWindow.
838
839This was reported to happen when Emacs runs with more than one frame,
840and one of them is closed, either with "C-x 5 0" or from the window
841manager.
842
843This bug was reported to Sun as
844
845 Gtk apps dump core in ximlocal.so.2:IMCheckIMWindow()
846 Bug Reports: 4463537
847
2aa82bcf 848Installing Solaris 8 patch 108773-12 for Sparc and 108774-12 for x86
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849reportedly fixes the bug, which appears to be inside the shared
850library xiiimp.so.
851
852Alternatively, you can configure Emacs with `--with-xim=no' to prevent
853the core dump, but will loose X input method support, of course. (You
854can use Emacs's own input methods instead, if you install Leim.)
855
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856* On Solaris 7, Emacs gets a segmentation fault when starting up using X.
857
858This results from Sun patch 107058-01 (SunOS 5.7: Patch for
3156909f
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859assembler) if you use GCC version 2.7 or later.
860To work around it, either install patch 106950-03 or later,
861or uninstall patch 107058-01, or install the GNU Binutils.
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862Then recompile Emacs, and it should work.
863
864* With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
865
866Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
867
868 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
869 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
870 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
871 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
872 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
873 /******************************************************************
874
875 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
876 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
877 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
878 XLCd lcd;
879 {
880 - char* begin;
881 - char* end;
882 + char* begin = NULL;
883 + char* end = NULL;
884 char* ret;
885 int i = 0;
886 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
887 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
888 }
889 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
890 if (ret != NULL) {
891 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
892 + if (begin != NULL) {
893 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
894 + } else {
895 + ret[0] = '\0';
896 + }
897 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
898 }
899 return ret;
900
901
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902* Emacs crashes on Irix 6.5 on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
903
904This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
905
906* Emacs crashes in utmpname on Irix 5.3.
907
908This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
909It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
910
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911* The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
912
913This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
914combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
915definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
916might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
917purposes.
918
919We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
920you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
921
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922* On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
923the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
924
925You can fix this by editing the file:
926
927 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
928
929Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
930
931 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
932
933that should read:
934
935 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
936
937Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
938
939* Emacs on Digital Unix 4.0 fails to build, giving error message
940 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
941
942This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
943Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
944
945* Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
946
947Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
948problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
949documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
950
951* Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
952
953These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
954particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
955configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
956configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
957change this.
958
959* When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
960
961When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
962(either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
963then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
964correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
965gives the appearance of "double spacing".
966
967To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
968feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
969
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970* Failure in unexec while dumping emacs on Digital Unix 4.0
971
972This problem manifests itself as an error message
973
974 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
975
976The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
977were built for an older system version,
978
979 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
980
981made the problem go away.
982
983* No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
984
985This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
986as of 8 Dec 1998.
987
988The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
989
990* As of version 20.4, Emacs doesn't work properly if configured for
991the Motif toolkit and linked against the free LessTif library. The
992next Emacs release is expected to work with LessTif.
993
994* Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
995
996This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
997a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
998likely to cause it.
999
1000We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1001
1002* Emacs makes HPUX 11.0 crash.
1003
1004This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1005
1006* Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine (HPUX 10.20).
1007
1008This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
1009
1010* The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
1011Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
1012`add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
1013'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
1014
1015* Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
1016(alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
1017Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
1018earlier versions.
1019
1020--- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
1021+++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
1022@@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
1023 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
1024 (cond
1025 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
1026- (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
1027+ (insert-file-contents entity)
1028 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
1029 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
1030 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
1031
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1032* Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUC TeX installed.
1033
1034Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUC TeX; upgrading should solve
1035these problems.
1036
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1037* No colors in AUC TeX with Emacs 21.
1038
1039Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
1040byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
1041
d238f982 1042* Running TeX from AUC TeX package with Emacs 20.3 gives a Lisp error
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1043about a read-only tex output buffer.
1044
1045This problem appeared for AUC TeX version 9.9j and some earlier
1046versions. Here is a patch for the file tex-buf.el in the AUC TeX
1047package.
1048
1049diff -c auctex/tex-buf.el~ auctex/tex-buf.el
1050*** auctex/tex-buf.el~ Wed Jul 29 18:35:32 1998
1051--- auctex/tex-buf.el Sat Sep 5 15:20:38 1998
1052***************
1053*** 545,551 ****
1054 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1055 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1056 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1057! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer)
1058 (set-buffer buffer)
1059 (if dir (cd dir))
1060 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1061- --- 545,552 ----
1062 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1063 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1064 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1065! (let (temp-buffer-show-function temp-buffer-show-hook)
1066! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer))
1067 (set-buffer buffer)
1068 (if dir (cd dir))
1069 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1070
1071* On Irix 6.3, substituting environment variables in file names
1072in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
1073
1074 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
1075
1076This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
1077003082 August 11, 1998.
1078
1079* After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1080
1081The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1082 (standard-display-european t)
1083That should be changed to
1084 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1085
1086* Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
1087
1088You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
1089supplies the `install-info' command.
1090
1091* Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key, on HPUX.
1092
1093To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1094rights, containing this text:
1095
1096--------------------------------
1097xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1098keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1099keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1100EOF
1101
1102xmodmap - << EOF
1103clear mod1
1104keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1105add mod1 = Meta_L
1106keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1107add mod2 = Mode_switch
1108EOF
1109--------------------------------
1110
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1111* Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1112
62c485d2
GM
1113This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1114requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1115of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1116which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1117while, Emacs will print a message:
17a37d87
EZ
1118
1119 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1120
62c485d2 1121A workaround is to not use `klipper'.
17a37d87 1122
a933dad1
DL
1123* Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
1124in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
1125drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
1126
1127This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
1128device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
1129work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
1130
1131* M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1132
1133See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1134for character composition.
1135
1136* Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
1137
1138This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
1139full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
1140/etc/hosts file, something like this:
1141
1142127.0.0.1 localhost
1143129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
1144
1145The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
1146
1147* Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs on Digital Unix 4.0.
1148
1149So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
1150is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
1151properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
1152`tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
1153in Emacs.
1154
1155* When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
1156
3d00585e
EZ
1157This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
1158characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
1159characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
1160support for 8-bit characters.
a933dad1 1161
3d00585e
EZ
1162To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
1163this at your shell's prompt:
1164
1165 ispell -vv
1166
1167and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
1168"!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
1169does not.
1170
1171To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
1172in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
1173Then rebuild the speller.
1174
1175Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
1176version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
1177
1178Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
1179in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
1180Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
1181it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
1182spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
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DL
1183
1184* On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
11855.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1186
1187This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1188One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1189known to work.
1190
1191* On Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
1192CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
1193
1194This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
1195
1196Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
1197events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
1198distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
1199combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
1200AltGr has been pressed.
1201
1202* Under some Windows X-servers, Emacs' display is incorrect
1203
1204The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
1205screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
1206display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
1207to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
1208
1209This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions as
1210well. The problem lies in the X-server settings.
1211
1212There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
1213running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
1214un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
1215selection".
1216
1217Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
1218please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
1219If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
1220here.
1221
1222* On Solaris 2, Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
1223
1224The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
1225Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
1226(Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
1227You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
1228You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
1229look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
1230are currently recommended for your host.
1231
1232On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
1233105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
1234105284-18 might fix it again.
1235
3156909f
PE
1236* On Solaris 2.6 and 7, the Compose key does not work.
1237
1238This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
1239the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
1240support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
1241If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
a933dad1
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1242
1243One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
1244For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
1245variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
1246lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
1247should do.
1248
3156909f
PE
1249pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
1250if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
1251libraries.
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DL
1252
1253* Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
1254
1255You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
1256either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
1257calls for specifying this.
1258
1259If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
1260mail-host-address to the value you want.
1261
1262* Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs, on UnixWare 2.1
1263
1264Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
1265virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
1266the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
1267error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
1268exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
1269memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
1270
1271You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
1272But you have to be root to do it.
1273
1274According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
1275
1276 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
1277 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
1278 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
1279 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
1280 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
1281
1282(He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
1283These changes take effect when you reboot.
1284
1285* Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1286
1287We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1288scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1289happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1290on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1291
1292Here's how to do this:
1293
1294 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1295
1296If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1297try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1298to normal, do
1299
1300 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1301
1302* Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
1303
1304Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
1305supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
1306many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
1307
1308If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
1309server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
1310You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
1311
1312The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
1313display all the characters Emacs supports.
1314
4c635a29
DL
1315Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
1316missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
1317character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
1318but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
1319of this character to display a space.
1320
a933dad1
DL
1321* Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
1322
1323You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
1324
1325* Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
1326
1327This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
1328than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
1329lines do not overlap.
1330
1331* You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
1332video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
1333
1334This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
1335your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
1336check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
1337
1338* In FreeBSD 2.1.5, useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1339directories that have the +t bit.
1340
1341This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1342Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1343with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1344link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1345
1346If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1347file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1348
1349* When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1350commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1351
1352You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1353
1354 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1355
1356* Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
1357appear on disk.
1358
1359This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
1360remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
1361implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
1362detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
1363calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
1364where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
1365
1366* "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
1367
1368If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
1369will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
1370in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
1371did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
1372character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
1373must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
1374
1375You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
1376them to two different keys.
1377
1378* Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup, on AIX4.2.
1379
1380If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
1381without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
1382
1383* movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
1384
1385Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
1386NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
1387entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
1388listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
1389the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
1390old POP protocol.
1391
1392* Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
1393
1394This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
1395use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
1396an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
1397happens to exist on your X server).
1398
1399* Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
1400
1401This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
1402prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
1403to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
1404
1405Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
1406(src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
1407
1408* Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on HPUX 9 after you delete a frame.
1409
1410We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
1411the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
1412does not happen.
1413
1414* Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1415
1416We suspect that this is a similar bug in the X libraries provided by
1417Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1418makes the problem stop:
1419
1420105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1421105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1422106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1423105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1424
1425Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1426suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1427
1428106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1429106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1430105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1431
1432* Problems running Perl under Emacs on Windows NT/95.
1433
1434`perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
1435The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
1436
1437The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
1438"CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
1439with the user.
1440
1441On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
1442pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
1443communicate with the subprocess.
1444
1445On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
1446relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
1447redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
1448stdin.
1449
1450A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
1451
1452For Perl 4:
1453
1454 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
1455 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
1456 ***************
1457 *** 68,74 ****
1458 $rcfile=".perldb";
1459 }
1460 else {
1461 ! $console = "con";
1462 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1463 }
1464
1465 --- 68,74 ----
1466 $rcfile=".perldb";
1467 }
1468 else {
1469 ! $console = "";
1470 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1471 }
1472
1473
1474 For Perl 5:
1475 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
1476 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
1477 ***************
1478 *** 22,28 ****
1479 $rcfile=".perldb";
1480 }
1481 elsif (-e "con") {
1482 ! $console = "con";
1483 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1484 }
1485 else {
1486 --- 22,28 ----
1487 $rcfile=".perldb";
1488 }
1489 elsif (-e "con") {
1490 ! $console = "";
1491 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1492 }
1493 else {
1494
1495* Problems running DOS programs on Windows NT versions earlier than 3.51.
1496
1497Some DOS programs, such as pkzip/pkunzip will not work at all, while
1498others will only work if their stdin is redirected from a file or NUL.
1499
1500When a DOS program does not work, a new process is actually created, but
1501hangs. It cannot be interrupted from Emacs, and might need to be killed
1502by an external program if Emacs is hung waiting for the process to
1503finish. If Emacs is not waiting for it, you should be able to kill the
1504instance of ntvdm that is running the hung process from Emacs, if you
1505can find out the process id.
1506
1507It is safe to run most DOS programs using call-process (eg. M-! and
1508M-|) since stdin is then redirected from a file, but not with
1509start-process since that redirects stdin to a pipe. Also, running DOS
1510programs in a shell buffer prompt without redirecting stdin does not
1511work.
1512
1513* Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs:
1514
1515There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
1516
1517 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
1518 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
1519 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
1520
1521To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
1522subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
1523them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
1524incorrect library functions.
1525
f1e54ce1
EZ
1526* When compiling with DJGPP on Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
1527
1528If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
1529Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
1530program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
1531config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
1532the front of your PATH environment variable.
1533
a933dad1
DL
1534* When compiling with DJGPP on Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
1535like make-docfile.
1536
1537This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
1538variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
1539compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
1540the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
1541
1542* Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
1543run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
a01325b8
EZ
1544
1545Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
a933dad1
DL
1546immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
1547the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
a01325b8
EZ
1548and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
1549
1550Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
1551the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
1552Lisp.
a933dad1
DL
1553
1554This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
1555support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
1556characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
1557You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
1558filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
1559compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
1560explains this issue in more detail.
1561
a01325b8
EZ
1562Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
1563MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
1564by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
1565unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
1566them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
1567must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
1568properly truncated.
1569
a933dad1
DL
1570* Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
1571
1572 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
1573
1574This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
1575on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
1576value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
1577works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
1578support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
1579undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
1580[emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
1581`TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
1582your system works as before.
1583
1584* On Windows 95, Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
1585
1586This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
1587You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
1588
1589* Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on Windows 95.
1590
1591This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1592you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
1593and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way.
1594
1595* `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
1596
1597This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
1598version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
1599definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
1600incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
1601does not work with this version of ncurses.
1602
1603The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
1604
1605* Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
1606
1607Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
1608editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
1609as GCC.
1610
1611* Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly truncated
1612on GNU/Linux systems.
1613
1614This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
16151.3.75.
1616
1617* Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1618
1619There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1620caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1621problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1622is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1623
1624Using the old library version is a workaround.
1625
1626* On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
1627
1628This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
1629version of Solaris that you are using.
1630
1631* Emacs dumps core on startup, on Solaris.
1632
1633Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
1634102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
1635Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
1636by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
1637However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
1638
1639Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
1640you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
1641We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
1642for certain.
1643
1644 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
1645 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
1646 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
1647
1648(One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
1649with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
1650
1651If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
1652bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1653
1654Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
1655Solaris 2.5.
1656
1657* Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called, on Solaris.
1658
1659If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
1660of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
1661called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
1662
1663* "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes on HPUX, in
1664Emacs built with Motif.
1665
1666This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1667such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1668
1669* On Irix 6.0, make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi
1670
1671A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
1672in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
1673find that string, and take out the spaces.
1674
1675Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
1676
1677* "out of virtual swap space" on Irix 5.3
1678
1679This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
1680many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
1681swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
1682can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
1683command `swap -l'.
1684
1685You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
1686line like this:
1687
1688/usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
1689
1690where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
1691by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
1692that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
1693new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
1694information.
1695
1696The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
1697swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
1698on the network that can log on to the host.
1699
1700If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
1701the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
1702some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
1703icons.
1704
1705You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
1706FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
1707("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
1708ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
1709
1710* With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
1711character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
1712
1713One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
1714away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
1715XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
1716
1717* On SunOS 4.1.3, Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
1718
1719This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
1720on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
1721version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
1722it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
1723
1724* On SunOS 4, Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
1725(or log out, if you logged in using X).
1726
1727Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
1728
1729* On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1730with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1731
1732On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1733`unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1734Definitions" to make them defined.
1735
1736* On SunOS, you get linker errors
1737 ld: Undefined symbol
1738 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
1739 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
1740
1741The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
1742or link libXmu statically.
1743
1744* On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as
1745 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
1746 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
1747
1748This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
1749these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
1750you build Emacs:
1751
1752 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
1753 chmod 664 libIM.a
1754 ranlib libIM.a
1755
1756Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
1757Makefile).
1758
1759* Unpredictable segmentation faults on Solaris 2.3 and 2.4.
1760
1761A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
1762the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
1763
1764We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
1765
1766* Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for
1767Windows.
1768
1769A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
1770Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
1771problem.
1772
1773* Emacs crashes at startup on MSDOS.
1774
1775Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
1776and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
1777know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
1778memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
1779However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
1780
1781You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
1782arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
1783information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
1784is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
1785
1786Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
1787configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
1788removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
1789and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
1790the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
1791
1792* A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
1793
1794twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
1795You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
1796
1797 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
1798
1799* Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
1800
1801This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
1802the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
1803Emacs's configure script.
1804
1805* Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
1806
1807This results from a bug in GNU Sed version 2.03. To solve the
1808problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
1809configure script.
1810
1811* On Sunos 4.1.1, there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
1812
1813If you get errors such as
1814
1815 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1816 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1817 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
1818
1819This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
1820to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
1821script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
1822make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
1823ones available when you build Emacs.
1824
1825* The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1826other non-English HP keyboards too).
1827
1828This is because HPUX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1829shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1830configures the X server.
1831
1832 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1833 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1834 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1835 EOF
1836
1837 xmodmap - << EOF
1838 clear mod1
1839 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1840 add mod1 = Meta_L
1841 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1842 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1843 EOF
1844
1845* The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
1846
1847Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
1848command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
1849Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
1850manager to use some other command. You can disable the
1851shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
1852
1853 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
1854
1855* Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1856
1857There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1858that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1859
1860* Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys.
1861
1862The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
1863be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
1864to allocate ptys reliably.
1865
1866* On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
1867
1868The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
1869Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
1870compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
1871workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
1872syms.h.
1873
1874* Slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1875
1876People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1877startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1878
1879This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1880Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1881improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1882networked and non-networked machines.
1883
1884Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1885
1886** Networked Case
1887
1888First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1889exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1890(replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1891
1892 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
1893
1894Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1895lines:
1896
1897 order hosts, bind
1898 multi on
1899
1900Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1901indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1902database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1903dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1904
1905** Non-Networked Case
1906
1907The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1908However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1909simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1910`touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1911file is not necessary with this approach.
1912
1913* On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
1914forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
1915
1916casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
1917after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
1918
1919 #if ThreadedX
1920 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
1921 #endif
1922
1923to:
1924
1925 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
1926 #if ThreadedX
1927 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
1928 #endif
1929 #endif
1930
1931Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
1932(as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
1933OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
1934Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
1935definition for your type of machine and system.
1936
1937Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
1938the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
1939Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
1940
1941For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
1942101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
1943to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
1944patch.
1945
1946However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
1947he changed
1948 #define ThreadedX YES
1949to
1950 #define ThreadedX NO
1951in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
1952`-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
1953typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
1954
1955* With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
1956 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
1957
1958This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
1959with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
1960another escape character in kermit. One user did
1961
1962 set escape-character 17
1963
1964in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
1965
1966* The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1967
1968This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1969
1970 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1971
1972That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1973do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1974explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1975the resource prevents the problem.
1976
1977* Emacs gets hung shortly after startup, on Sunos 4.1.3.
1978
1979We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
1980one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
1981
1982100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
1983100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
1984100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
1985100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
1986100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
1987
1988We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
1989which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1990
1991* Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
1992
1993This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
1994installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
1995specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
1996corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
1997the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
1998Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
1999files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
2000original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
2001not to work.
2002
2003The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
2004when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
2005is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
2006same directory where system header files are kept.
2007
2008* On Solaris 2.x, GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported"
2009
2010This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2011are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2012does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2013later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2014described in the Solaris FAQ
2015<http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2016to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
2017
2018* The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
2019
2020This shell command should fix it:
2021
2022 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
2023
2024* Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
2025
2026On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
2027with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
2028version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
2029C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
2030GCC.
2031
2032* On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2033
2034This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2035for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2036/usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2037
2038* You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
2039
2040On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
2041works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
2042bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
2043the Files menu).
2044
2045This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
2046due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
2047knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
2048workaround can be found.
2049
2050* Unusable default font on SCO 3.2v4.
2051
2052The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
2053that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
2054fonts, so it does not work.
2055
2056This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
2057the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
2058emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
2059that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
2060resources affect Emacs also:
2061
2062 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
2063 *Background: scoBackground
2064 *Foreground: scoForeground
2065
2066The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
2067Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
2068
2069 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
2070 Emacs*Background: white
2071 Emacs*Foreground: black
2072
2073(These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
2074suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
2075starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
2076environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
2077as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
2078/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
2079but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
2080Open Desktop display.
2081
2082These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
2083machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
2084
2085* rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
2086
2087This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
2088The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
2089
2090* Emacs is slow using X11R5 on HP/UX.
2091
2092This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2093doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2094because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2095libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2096those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2097install them and rebuild Emacs.
2098
2099* Loading fonts is very slow.
2100
2101You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
2102Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
2103directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
2104"fonts.scale".
2105
2106If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
2107font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
2108
2109With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
2110directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
2111Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
2112
2113* On AIX 3.2.4, releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2114
2115Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2116ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2117lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2118treated as control characters.
2119
2120You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2121releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2122
2123* display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2124
2125Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2126versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2127cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2128This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2129processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2130
2131Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2132the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2133
2134The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2135
2136* On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2137
2138This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2139C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2140
2141* Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
2142 segmentation fault and core dump.
2143
2144This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
2145added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
2146
2147 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
2148
2149If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
2150untar it :-).
2151
2152* Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2153
2154To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2155
2156 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2157
2158and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2159
2160The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2161cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2162
2163* Link failure on IBM AIX 1.3 ptf 0013.
2164
2165There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2166the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2167workaround/fix is:
2168
2169 cd /lib
2170 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2171 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2172
2173* Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose on a Sun.
2174
2175If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
2176with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
2177the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
2178libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
2179toolkit.)
2180
2181If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
2182lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
2183X11R4, then use it in the link.
2184
2185* Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'
2186
2187This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2188Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2189Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2190where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2191
2192So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2193
2194* In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
2195
2196This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
2197smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
2198on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
2199problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
2200
2201 if ($?EMACS) then
2202 if ($EMACS == "t") then
2203 unset edit
2204 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
2205 endif
2206 endif
2207
2208* An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
2209parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
2210
2211This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
2212 emacs*Cursor: black
2213(which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
2214that isn't a color.)
2215
2216The fix is to correct your X resources.
2217
2218* Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1 using --with-x-toolkit.
2219
2220If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
2221_iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
2222-lXaw in the command that links temacs.
2223
2224This problem seems to arise only when the international language
2225extensions to X11R5 are installed.
2226
2227* Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
2228
2229This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
2230to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
2231Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
2232
2233* src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2234
2235This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2236had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.
2237
2238* Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
2239
2240If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
2241resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
2242renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
2243font.
2244
2245One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
2246your font path, like this:
2247
2248 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
2249
2250* Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
2251
2252An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
2253
2254 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
2255
2256This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
2257individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
2258want, rewrite the resource.
2259
2260To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
2261-query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
2262the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
2263
2264* --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
2265
2266On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
2267unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
2268toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
2269libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
2270unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
2271and Solaris in version 19.29.
2272
2273* `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2274
2275This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2276commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2277Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2278hand.
2279
2280* --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong on BSD/386.
2281
2282This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
2283The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
2284such as bash.
2285
2286* Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies, on Sunos 5.3.
2287
2288A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2289exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2290applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2291communicating through pipes.
2292
2293* Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2294
2295Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2296sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2297delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2298program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2299means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2300command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2301obtain the destination address.
2302
2303There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2304In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2305non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
23062.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
23074.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2308have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2309of this writing, these official versions are available:
2310
2311 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2312 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2313 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2314 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2315 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2316
2317 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2318 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2319
2320* On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs:
2321
2322 Could not load program emacs
2323 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2324 Error was: Exec format error
2325
2326or this one:
2327
2328 Could not load program .emacs
2329 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2330 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2331 Error was: Exec format error
2332
2333These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2334compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2335
2336* On AIX, you get this compiler error message:
2337
2338 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2339 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2340
2341This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2342libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2343X11Dev... with smit.
2344
2345* You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
2346
2347This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
2348Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
2349character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
2350to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
2351
2352For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
2353
2354 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
2355
2356If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
2357Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
2358xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
2359
2360* C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
2361
2362You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
2363though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
2364or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
2365
2366* Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
2367
2368These control the actions of Emacs.
2369~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
2370EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
2371"load" will search.
2372
2373If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
2374of them, then try again.
2375
2376* After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2377
2378Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2379mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2380the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2381
2382Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2383you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2384operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2385configure script) that reads:
2386#define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2387This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2388the kernel bug.
2389
2390* Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
2391directly with an X server.
2392
2393If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
2394does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
2395whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
2396followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
2397it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
2398have made the key binding correctly.
2399
2400If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
2401be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
2402server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
2403default.
2404
2405If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
2406
2407 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
2408 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
2409
2410If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
2411commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
2412are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
2413modifier bit not otherwise used.
2414
2415If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
2416keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
2417some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
2418commands show above to make them modifier keys.
2419
2420Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
2421into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
2422
2423* `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'
2424
2425On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
2426file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
2427does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
2428value is just ten seconds.
2429
2430If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
2431
2432* `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2433
2434On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2435in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2436expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2437in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2438
2439The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2440anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2441
2442I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2443going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2444Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2445in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2446
2447* On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2448
2449Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2450the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2451sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2452
2453* Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2454
2455Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2456
2457* Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
2458the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
2459* Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
2460* GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
2461
2462This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
2463libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
2464shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
2465similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
2466
2467The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
2468the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
2469
2470The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
2471installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
2472
2473On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
2474
2475If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
2476then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
2477do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
2478or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
2479that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
2480be careful not to lose the others.
2481
2482Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
2483
2484#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
2485
2486Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
2487the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
2488again to say this:
2489
2490#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
2491
2492* On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
2493
2494 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
2495
2496The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
2497
2498The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
2499
2500* Self documentation messages are garbled.
2501
2502This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
2503with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
2504corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
2505
2506* Trouble using ptys on AIX.
2507
2508People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2509Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2510
2511* Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
2512
2513christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
2514
2515The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
2516execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
2517tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
2518but tty is giving it back 3.
2519
2520The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
2521word:
2522
2523if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
2524
2525should be changed to:
2526
2527if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
2528
2529Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
2530and into .login.
2531
2532* Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
2533
2534Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
2535
2536* Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
2537* `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
2538
2539One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
2540your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
2541the environment.
2542
2543* Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
2544
2545If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
2546`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
2547that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
2548with a floating point option other than the default.
2549
2550It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
2551crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
2552However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
2553floating point option: -fsoft.
2554
2555* Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
2556
2557The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
2558arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
2559tell Emacs to compensate for this.
2560
2561I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
2562whether this problem is present on a given system.
2563
2564* Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
2565 as a concentrator.
2566
2567This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
25687 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
2569
2570* M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2571
2572This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2573version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2574
2575* Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
2576 terminal type.
2577
2578The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
2579environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
2580provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
2581emulates.
2582
2583Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
2584in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
2585it only if it is undefined.
2586
2587 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
2588
2589Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
2590happen in a non-login shell.
2591
2592* X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
2593
2594People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
2595not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
2596the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
2597the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
2598
2599You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
2600However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
2601you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
2602
2603The easy way to do this is to put
2604
2605 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
2606
2607in your site-init.el file.
2608
2609* Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2610
2611On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2612may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2613is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2614As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2615
2616* Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
2617
2618You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2619
2620 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2621
2622This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2623Here is how to make more of them.
2624
2625 % cd /dev
2626 % ls pty*
2627 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2628 % /etc/crpty 8
2629 # creates eight new pty's
2630
2631* Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
2632
2633This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2634Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2635
2636It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2637space available on the machine.
2638
2639On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2640subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2641for large blocks (many pages).
2642
2643* test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
2644* or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
2645* or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2646* or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs
2647
2648This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2649fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2650binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2651
2652In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2653It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2654a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2655itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2656when unpacking the shell archive.
2657
2658I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2659what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2660file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2661
2662If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2663nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2664
2665 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2666 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2667 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2668 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2669 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2670 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2671 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2672 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2673 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2674 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2675 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2676 and remake temacs.
2677 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2678
2679* temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
2680
2681This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2682files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2683space than was allocated.
2684
2685This could be caused by
2686 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2687 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2688 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2689 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2690 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2691 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2692 deleting that file.
2693 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2694 (not from the directory you expected).
2695 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2696 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2697 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2698 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2699 the space required.
2700
2701If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2702of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2703
2704But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2705of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2706problem.
2707
2708* Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
2709
2710You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
2711Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
2712will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
2713and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
2714
2715Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
2716than the corresponding .el file.
2717
2718* The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2719
2720Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2721
27221) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2723as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2724it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2725value in the man page for a.out (5).
2726
27272) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2728initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2729of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2730not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2731may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2732
2733* Compilation errors on VMS.
2734
2735You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
2736variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
2737This is not an error. Ignore it.
2738
2739VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
2740were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
2741
2742There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
2743in conditional expressions. The bug is:
2744 char c = -1, d = 1;
2745 int i;
2746
2747 i = d ? c : d;
2748The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
2749conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
2750constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
2751
2752* rmail gets error getting new mail
2753
2754rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
2755called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
2756the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
2757
2758There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
2759the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
2760`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
2761this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
2762the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
2763IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
2764SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
2765
2766If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2767prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2768you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2769`mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
2770
2771 chgrp mail movemail
2772 chmod 2755 movemail
2773
2774If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2775prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2776you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2777`mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
2778make install.
2779
2780 chgrp mail movemail
2781 chmod 2755 movemail
2782
2783Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
2784installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
2785installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
2786/usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
2787mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
2788directory copy is ineffective.
2789
2790* Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
2791
2792This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
2793used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
2794away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
2795streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
2796user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
2797properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
2798input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
2799easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
2800
2801There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
2802
2803 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
2804 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
2805 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
2806
2807First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
2808they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
2809"no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
2810escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
2811and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
2812control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
2813
2814Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
2815needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
2816by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
2817rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
2818your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
2819it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
2820the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
2821problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
2822to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
2823
2824For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
2825giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
2826codes. You might as well try it.
2827
2828If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
2829through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
2830computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
2831much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
2832control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
2833you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
2834replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
2835measures can make Emacs semi-work.
2836
2837You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
2838handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
2839enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
2840now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
2841enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
2842control handling.)
2843
2844If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
2845is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
2846other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
2847and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
2848other control characters are already used by emacs.
2849
2850IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
2851Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
2852order to continue.
2853
2854If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
2855certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
2856`enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
2857automatically. Here is an example:
2858
2859(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
2860
2861If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
2862and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
2863manually.
2864
2865I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
2866assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
2867control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
2868merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
2869widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
2870use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
2871will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
2872of inferior systems.
2873
2874* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
2875
2876For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
2877control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
2878terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
2879that wants to use flow control.
2880
2881You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
2882If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
2883flow control, as described in the preceding section.
2884
2885If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
2886into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
2887shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
2888
2889* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
2890
2891Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
2892control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
2893On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
2894control on the local system.
2895
2896One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
2897(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
2898stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
2899"stty start u stop u" will do this.
2900
2901Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
2902around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
2903issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
2904
2905If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
2906M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
2907if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
2908following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
2909
2910(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
2911
2912See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
2913info.
2914
2915* Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
2916
2917This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
2918terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
2919the combination of features specified for that terminal.
2920
2921The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
2922Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
2923(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
2924terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
2925what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
2926and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
2927There are several possibilities:
2928
29291) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
2930
2931In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
2932need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
2933
29342) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
2935 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
2936 by termcap.
2937
2938This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
2939Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
2940and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
2941classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
2942Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
2943tested on many kinds of terminals.
2944
29453) The termcap entry is wrong.
2946
2947See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
2948that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
2949for certain terminals.
2950
29514) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
2952 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
2953
2954This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
2955in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
2956
2957* Output from Control-V is slow.
2958
2959On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
2960Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
2961to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
2962before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
2963the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
2964it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
2965
2966If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
2967that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
2968specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
2969concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
2970send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
2971fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
2972time as the operations really take.
2973
2974Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
2975at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
2976terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
2977operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
2978flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
2979an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
2980Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
2981cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
2982not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
2983is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
2984
2985Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
2986multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
2987termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
2988fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
2989each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
2990to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
2991`cm' string.
2992
2993You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
2994has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
2995take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
2996
2997A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
2998of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
2999
3000* Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
3001
3002The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
3003
3004 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
3005 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
3006
3007This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
3008
3009* You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
3010
3011Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
3012after a day or two.
3013
3014The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
3015the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
3016character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
3017of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
3018overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
3019to it.
3020
3021For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
3022and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
3023other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
3024but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
3025that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
3026important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
3027
3028If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
3029you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
3030 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
3031You can probably access help-command via f1.
3032
3033* Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
3034It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
3035but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
3036causes it.
3037
3038 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
3039 call in the RFS server.
3040
3041 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
3042 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
3043 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
3044 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
3045
3046 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
3047
3048 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
3049 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
3050 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
3051 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
3052 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
3053 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
3054 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
3055
3056 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
3057
3058 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3059 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
3060 retrieving revision 1.2
3061 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3062 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
3063 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
3064 ***************
3065 *** 163,169 ****
3066 /*
3067 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3068 */
3069 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
3070 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3071 else
3072 {
3073 --- 166,172 ----
3074 /*
3075 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3076 */
3077 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
3078 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3079 else
3080 {
3081
3082* Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3083
3084You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3085
3086 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3087 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3088
3089These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3090Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3091may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3092on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3093in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3094can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3095that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3096
3097As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3098you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3099can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3100should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3101array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3102 Lisp_Object *args;
3103 ...
3104 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3105putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3106 Lisp_Object *args;
3107 Lisp_Object tem;
3108 ...
3109 tem = args[i];
3110 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3111causes the problem to go away.
3112The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3113so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3114
3115* 68000 C compiler problems
3116
3117Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3118These are some that have been observed.
3119
3120** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3121This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3122if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3123
3124** "cannot reclaim" error.
3125
3126This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3127line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3128simpler expressions.
3129
3130** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3131
3132If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3133Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3134
3135struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3136
3137lose (arg)
3138 struct foo arg;
3139{
3140 test ((int *) arg.y);
3141}
3142
3143If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3144In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3145((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3146
3147This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3148of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3149
3150* C compilers lose on returning unions
3151
3152I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3153Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3154defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3155
3156This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3157of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3158
53854552
EZ
3159\f
3160Local variables:
3161mode: outline
3162paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3163end: