(x_display_and_set_cursor): Fix typo.
[bpt/emacs.git] / etc / PROBLEMS
CommitLineData
a933dad1
DL
1This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
3
2aa82bcf
EZ
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
8632c7cb
EZ
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).
2aa82bcf
EZ
15
16The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
8632c7cb
EZ
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 ...
8632c7cb
EZ
23
24(replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
25the script).
2aa82bcf
EZ
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
4593687f
EZ
30* Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
31undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
c93bdf05
EZ
32
33This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
34with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
35GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
36from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
37compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
38link stage.
39
40A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
41
42 make CC=gcc
43
4593687f
EZ
44Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
45with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
46
9272ccfc
AI
47* Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
48
49Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
50version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
51necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
52__MSVCRT__, like so:
53
54 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
55
56* Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
7c22dc9d
EZ
57
58The error message might be something like this:
59
c24be289 60 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
7c22dc9d
EZ
61 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
62 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
63 '0xffffffff'
64 Stop.
65
66This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
67which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
68`*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
69endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
70or EOL conversions.
71
72The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
73change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
74in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
75which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
76mangling them.
77
677e7496
EZ
78* Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
79
80The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
81C backtrace printed by GDB:
82
83 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
84 (gdb) where
85 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
86 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
87 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
88 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
89
90This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
91of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
92but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
93other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
94distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
95GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
96following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
97distribution:
98
cbfe0252 99 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
677e7496
EZ
100 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
101 know what's really going on here. */
102 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
103 0x10000000. */
104 #if defined __linux__
105 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
106 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
107 #endif
108 #endif
109 #endif /* 0 */
110
111Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
112the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
113should now succeed.
114
9ed04369
DL
115* JPEG images aren't displayed.
116
117This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
118Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem.
119
b87207a0
EZ
120* Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
121
122This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
123defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
124patch to assert.h should solve this:
125
126*** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
127--- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
128***************
129*** 41,47 ****
130 /*
131 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
132 */
133! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
134
135 #else /* debugging enabled */
136
137--- 41,47 ----
138 /*
139 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
140 */
141! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
142
143 #else /* debugging enabled */
144
145
61638355
EZ
146
147* Improving performance with slow X connections
148
149If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
150language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by
151configuring Emacs with option `--without-xim'. Configuring Emacs
152without XIM does not affect the use of Emacs' own input methods, which
153are part of the Leim package.
154
155If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
156switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
157
158* Getting a Meta key on the FreeBSD console
159
160By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
161FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
162current keymap to a file with the command
163
164 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
165
166Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
167definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
168key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
169to look like this
170
171 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
172
173to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
174
175 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
176
177* Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
178
179A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
180into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
181incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
182other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
183been filed.
184
185* Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font
186
187This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
1882.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
189event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
190Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
191
192A workaround for this is to add something like
193
194emacs.waitForWM: false
195
196to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
197frame's parameter list, like this:
198
199 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
200
201(this should go into your `.emacs' file).
202
203* Underlines appear at the wrong position.
204
205This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
556a9fad
EZ
206Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
207neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
208problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
209`.emacs'.
210
211To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
212type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
213property.
61638355 214
49172314
GM
215* When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
216click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
217is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
218problem disappears.
219
ed0d1d91
RS
220* There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
221XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
222one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
96bde66b
EZ
223For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
224"C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
225used with neXtaw at run time.
226
227The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
228want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
229built Emacs with.
ed0d1d91 230
6e1a66dc
EZ
231* Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
232
233This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
234a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
235--without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
236
3c418e54
EZ
237* Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
238
239This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
240terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
241If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
242version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
243and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
244
245All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
246problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
247terminfo when built.
248
f9130829
EZ
249* Error messages about undefined colors on X.
250
251The messages might say something like this:
252
253 Unable to load color "grey95"
254
255(typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
256
257 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
258
259These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
260many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
261resources to load all the colors it needs.
262
263A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
264
ed85f61d
EZ
265* Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
266
9ed04369
DL
267Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
268emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
269entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
270"Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
271supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
b300fd77
EZ
272Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
273uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
274"colors".
275
276In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
277``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
278back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
279use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
280doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
281sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
282it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
283capability).
284
285Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
286attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
287incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
288this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
ed85f61d 289
9ed04369
DL
290Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
291of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
ed85f61d 292entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
9ed04369
DL
293`xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
294emulator.
ed85f61d 295
fa2301bf
EZ
296Beginning with version 21.3, Emacs supports the --color command-line
297option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
298modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
299for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
300
9ed04369
DL
301Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
302Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
303Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
304recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
e085efdb
EZ
305global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
306`global-font-lock-mode'.
ed85f61d 307
d0cf6c7d
EZ
308* Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
309
310This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
311ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
312These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
313the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
314(show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
315blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
316cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
317always blinks.
318
319A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
320enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
321the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
322cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
323the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
324cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
325
326To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
327`linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
328the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
329produce a modified terminfo entry.
330
c289e7f0
EZ
331Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
332change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
333
339b95d5
EZ
334* Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
335
336The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
337emulation for which it is set up.
338
9ed04369
DL
339Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
340Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
341On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
342--enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
343successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
344lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
345menu placement.
339b95d5
EZ
346
347On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
9ed04369
DL
348locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
349what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
350developers.
339b95d5 351
b87207a0
EZ
352* Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.1.
353
25818acf
JR
354Emacs 21.1 built for MS-Windows doesn't support images and the tool bar.
355Support for these will be added in future versions.
b87207a0 356
d6cdfce6
JR
357Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
358is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menu items is not
359displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
360synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
361waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
362pop-up menu interaction.
f936978f 363
e071f64e
JR
364There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
365mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
366frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
367after moving back into it.
b87207a0 368
e071f64e
JR
369Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
370not as severely as in 21.1.
b87207a0
EZ
371
372Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
373characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
374
375An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
376Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
377
c24be289
JR
378Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.1). Some
379of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
380in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
e085efdb
EZ
381characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
382work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
383you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
384the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
385ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
386appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
387yet.)
388
c24be289 389Multilingual text put into the Windows clipboard by other Windows
e085efdb 390applications cannot be safely pasted into Emacs (as of v21.1). This
c24be289
JR
391is because Windows uses Unicode to represent multilingual text, but
392Emacs does not yet support Unicode well enough to decode it. This
e085efdb 393means that Emacs can only interchange non-ASCII text with other
c24be289 394Windows programs if the characters are in the system codepage.
e085efdb
EZ
395Reportedly, a partial solution is to install the Mule-UCS package and
396set selection-coding-system to utf-16-le-dos.
397
c8d9b4ee
EZ
398* The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
399
400This can happen because the linker by default only looks for shared
401libraries, but jpeg distribution by default doesn't build and doesn't
402install a shared version of the library, `libjpeg.so'. One system
49e37720
DL
403where this is known to happen is Compaq OSF/1 (`Tru64'), but it
404probably isn't limited to that system.
c8d9b4ee 405
9ed04369
DL
406You can configure the jpeg library with the `--enable-shared' option
407and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a shared version of libjpeg,
408which you need to install. Finally, rerun the Emacs configure script,
409which should now find the jpeg library. Alternatively, modify the
410generated src/Makefile to link the .a file explicitly.
c8d9b4ee 411
9ed04369
DL
412(If you need the static version of the jpeg library as well, configure
413libjpeg with both `--enable-static' and `--enable-shared' options.)
c8d9b4ee 414
d9810886
EZ
415* Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
416
d67e4586
EZ
417This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
418(RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
419(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
420configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
421files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
422left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
423itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
cbfe0252 424Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
d9810886 425
d04b2e49
EZ
426In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
427machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
428(it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
429This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
430
d9810886
EZ
431If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
432(Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
433you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
434force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
435problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
436blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
437`mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
438options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
439`/etc/auto.home'.
440
b4da93e1
EZ
441Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
442a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
443waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
444to work around the problem.
d9810886 445
aa99760e
EZ
446Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
447onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
448you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
449`/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
450
451 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
452
453The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
454
086b25d3
EZ
455* Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
456
457This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
458via NFS. Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
459binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
460
461 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
462
463We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
464build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
465
9ed04369 466* Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
d6b7de9b
EZ
467
468Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
469other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
470that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
471size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
472when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
473fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
474
475To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
476
477 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
478
479If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
480problem.
481
482The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
483`fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
484`xset fp rehash'.
485
ec6bd013
DL
486* Large file support is disabled on HP-UX. See the comments in
487src/s/hpux10.h.
488
e9a0a549 489* Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
ec6bd013
DL
490libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
491
4dea3d52 492* Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
a408ce18
EZ
493
494By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
495`{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
496any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
497vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
498parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
499in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
cbfe0252 500pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
a408ce18
EZ
501introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
502through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
503to the end of a very large buffer.
504
473347f6 505Beginning with version 21.3, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
cb46def7
EZ
506is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
507to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
508indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
473347f6 509
a408ce18
EZ
510If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
511makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
512fontification by setting the variable
513`font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
514be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
515
516Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
517in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
518
a38f41c4
EZ
519* When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
520or messed up.
521
cbfe0252 522For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
a38f41c4
EZ
523empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
524background.
525
526This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
527definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
528solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
529option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style.
530
531Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
532applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
533(should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
534so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
535Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
536present or commented out:
537
538 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
539 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
540 Emacs*Foreground
541 Emacs*Background
542
b87207a0
EZ
543* Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
544
545Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
546MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
547port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
548keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
549of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
550
61638355
EZ
551* Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
552
553If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
554due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
555and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
556port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
557are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
558confuses ange-ftp.
559
560The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
561(version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
c24be289
JR
562Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
563directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
564variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
565client's executable. For example:
61638355
EZ
566
567 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
568
569If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
570this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
571
572 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
573
a14e05ac
EZ
574* Some versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
575properly with Emacs 21. These problems are fixed in W3 version
5764.0pre.47.
a953a8d3 577
2ebf6139
GM
578* On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
579are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
580so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
581Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
582
cc2f2825 583* Compiling on AIX 4.3.x or 4.4 fails.
ec383c7d 584
9e2305c3 585This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
cc2f2825
EZ
586the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
587redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
588is to use the default compiler `cc'.
589
a14e05ac 590* Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
e1f9a6b3 591`before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
9ec9d3d2 592longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
1d297d9b 593
8f4df059
PJ
594* The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
595
596It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
597Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
598please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
599argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
600
3d7a4ec8
EZ
601* Unicode characters are not unified with other Mule charsets.
602
603As of v21.1, Emacs charsets are still not unified. This means that
604characters which belong to charsets such as Latin-2, Greek, Hebrew,
605etc. and the same characters in the `mule-unicode-*' charsets are
606different characters, as far as Emacs is concerned. For example, text
607which includes Unicode characters from the Latin-2 locale cannot be
608encoded by Emacs with ISO 8859-2 coding system; and if you yank Greek
609text from a buffer whose buffer-file-coding-system is greek-iso-8bit
610into a mule-unicode-0100-24ff buffer, Emacs won't be able to save that
611buffer neither as ISO 8859-7 nor as UTF-8.
612
613To work around this, install some add-on package such as Mule-UCS.
614
de7396bb
EZ
615* Problems when using Emacs with UTF-8 locales
616
617Some systems, including recent versions of GNU/Linux, have terminals
618or X11 subsystems that can be configured to provide Unicode/UTF-8
619input and display. Normally, such a system sets environment variables
620such as LANG, LC_CTYPE, or LC_ALL to a string which ends with a
621`.UTF-8'. For example, a system like this in a French locale might
622use `fr_FR.UTF-8' as the value of LANG.
623
624Since Unicode support in Emacs, as of v21.1, is not yet complete (see
625the previous entry in this file), UTF-8 support is not enabled by
626default, even in UTF-8 locales. Thus, some Emacs features, such as
627non-ASCII keyboard input, might appear to be broken in these locales.
628To solve these problems, you need to turn on some options in your
629`.emacs' file. Specifically, the following customizations should make
630Emacs work correctly with UTF-8 input and text:
631
632 (setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
633 (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
634 (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
635 (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
636 (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
637
b098c23c
EZ
638* The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
639
9ed04369
DL
640This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
641slots now. If the built-in Unicode/UTF-8 support is insufficient,
642e.g. if you need more CJK coverage, use the current Mule-UCS package.
643Any files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode won't be read
644correctly by Emacs 21.
224a0b4d 645
6343352f
EZ
646* Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
647
648The error message might be something like this:
649
650 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
651
652This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
653built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
654for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
655corrects that.
656
cc2f2825
EZ
657* ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
658
659This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
660defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
661runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
662
663The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
664
f4f4ee4d
GM
665* On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
666from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
667shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
668These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
669library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
670
0cb26e21
EZ
671Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
672process invokes Emacs several times.
673
f4f4ee4d
GM
674On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
675environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
676can be found.
677
678Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
679Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
680specified run-time search path in the executable.
681
8643647c 682On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
c31138a1
EZ
683linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
684backtraces like this:
685
686 (dbx) where
687 0 strcmp(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) ["/xlv22/ficus-jan23/work/irix/lib/libc/libc_n32_M3_ns/strings/strcmp.s":35, 0xfb7e480]
688 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
689 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
690 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
691 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
692 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
693 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
694 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
695 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
696
8643647c
RS
697(`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
698happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
c31138a1
EZ
699forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
700to work around the problem.
701
f4f4ee4d
GM
702Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
703
0c6456ad 704* On Solaris 2.7, building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
9b2999d0
DL
705C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
706compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
707release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
708another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
709and the default CFLAGS.
0c6456ad 710
b1739b51
EZ
711* Compiling syntax.c with the OPENSTEP 4.2 compiler gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
712
713The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
714following message:
715
716 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
717
718To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
719INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
720functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
721
722 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
723 {
724 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
725 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
726
727Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
728with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
729
e9a52cfe
EZ
730* Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
731
732A typical error message might be something like
733
734 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
735
736This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
737Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
738are:
739
740 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
741
742 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
743 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
744 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
745
746One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
747fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
748the problematic line(s) and correct them.
749
f25eb4f7
EZ
750* Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
751
752The typical error message might be like this:
753
754 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
755
756This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
757tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
758files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
759Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
760when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
761required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
762its loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
763
764Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
765file could fail to load if it is compressed.
766
767The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
768file.
769
edd7d3be
EZ
770Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
771lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
772print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
773
774 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
775
776If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
777and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
778load-path.
779
42303132
JR
780* Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
781
782An example of such an error is:
783
784 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
785
786This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your classpath.
787The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
788present in load-path:
789
790 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
791
792If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
793and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
794load-path.
795
f3d6f4ee
EZ
796* Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
797
798If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
799representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
f2d176f2
CW
800ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
801version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
802systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
803ftp client. On a Debian system, type
f3d6f4ee 804
f2d176f2 805 update-alternatives --config ftp
f3d6f4ee
EZ
806
807and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
808
8bbfd54a
JR
809* Emacs built on Windows 9x/ME crashes at startup on Windows XP,
810or Emacs built on XP crashes at startup on Windows 9x/ME.
811
812There appear to be general problems running programs compiled on
813Windows 9x/ME on Windows XP and vice-versa, at least when compilation
814is done with MSVC 6.0. This affects other programs as well as Emacs.
815The compatibility options in the program properties on Windows XP may
816help in some cases.
817
9f83d8b3
EZ
818* Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
819
820The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
821work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
822was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
823work when an antivirus package is installed.
824
825The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
826mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
827or disable it entirely.
828
f29d1e75
JR
829* On Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
830
831This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
832when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
833cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
cbfe0252 834http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
f29d1e75 835
4593687f 836* Windows 95/98/ME crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
c24be289 837
4593687f 838When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
c24be289 839Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
94e83484 840particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
5f08ab61 841program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
94e83484 842PATH.
c24be289 843
787994b7
DL
844* Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
845mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
846exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
847seen.
848
0a2eeca1
EZ
849* After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working.
850
851This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
852Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
853modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
854keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
855modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
856was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
857Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
858
859The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
860modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
861and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
862which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
863the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
864modifier:
865
866 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
867
868A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
869is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
870
871 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
872
873This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
874keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
875keys can serve as Meta.
876
877The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
878keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
879
119d3665
DL
880* On OSF/Dec Unix/Tru64/<whatever it is this year> under X locally or
881remotely, M-SPC acts as a `compose' key with strange results. See
882keyboard(5).
883
884Changing Alt_L to Meta_L fixes it:
885% xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L'
886% xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R'
887
a933dad1
DL
888* Error "conflicting types for `initstate'" compiling with GCC on Irix 6.
889
890Install GCC 2.95 or a newer version, and this problem should go away.
891It is possible that this problem results from upgrading the operating
892system without reinstalling GCC; so you could also try reinstalling
893the same version of GCC, and telling us whether that fixes the problem.
894
0de9f9a8
EZ
895* Emacs dumps core on Solaris in function IMCheckWindow.
896
897This was reported to happen when Emacs runs with more than one frame,
898and one of them is closed, either with "C-x 5 0" or from the window
899manager.
900
901This bug was reported to Sun as
902
903 Gtk apps dump core in ximlocal.so.2:IMCheckIMWindow()
904 Bug Reports: 4463537
905
2aa82bcf 906Installing Solaris 8 patch 108773-12 for Sparc and 108774-12 for x86
0de9f9a8
EZ
907reportedly fixes the bug, which appears to be inside the shared
908library xiiimp.so.
909
910Alternatively, you can configure Emacs with `--with-xim=no' to prevent
911the core dump, but will loose X input method support, of course. (You
912can use Emacs's own input methods instead, if you install Leim.)
913
a933dad1
DL
914* On Solaris 7, Emacs gets a segmentation fault when starting up using X.
915
916This results from Sun patch 107058-01 (SunOS 5.7: Patch for
3156909f
PE
917assembler) if you use GCC version 2.7 or later.
918To work around it, either install patch 106950-03 or later,
919or uninstall patch 107058-01, or install the GNU Binutils.
a933dad1
DL
920Then recompile Emacs, and it should work.
921
922* With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
923
924Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
925
926 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
927 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
928 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
929 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
930 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
931 /******************************************************************
932
933 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
934 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
935 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
936 XLCd lcd;
937 {
938 - char* begin;
939 - char* end;
940 + char* begin = NULL;
941 + char* end = NULL;
942 char* ret;
943 int i = 0;
944 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
945 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
946 }
947 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
948 if (ret != NULL) {
949 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
950 + if (begin != NULL) {
951 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
952 + } else {
953 + ret[0] = '\0';
954 + }
955 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
956 }
957 return ret;
958
959
a933dad1
DL
960* Emacs crashes on Irix 6.5 on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
961
962This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
963
964* Emacs crashes in utmpname on Irix 5.3.
965
966This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
967It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
968
de121241
EZ
969* The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
970
971This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
972combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
973definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
974might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
975purposes.
976
977We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
978you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
979
a933dad1
DL
980* On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
981the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
982
983You can fix this by editing the file:
984
985 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
986
987Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
988
989 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
990
991that should read:
992
993 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
994
995Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
996
997* Emacs on Digital Unix 4.0 fails to build, giving error message
998 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
999
1000This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
1001Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
1002
1003* Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
1004
1005Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
1006problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
1007documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
1008
1009* Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1010
1011These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1012particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1013configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1014configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1015change this.
1016
1017* When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
1018
1019When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
1020(either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
1021then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
1022correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
1023gives the appearance of "double spacing".
1024
e9a0a549 1025To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
a933dad1
DL
1026feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
1027
a933dad1
DL
1028* Failure in unexec while dumping emacs on Digital Unix 4.0
1029
1030This problem manifests itself as an error message
1031
1032 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
1033
1034The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
1035were built for an older system version,
1036
1037 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
1038
1039made the problem go away.
1040
1041* No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
1042
1043This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
1044as of 8 Dec 1998.
1045
1046The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
1047
1048* As of version 20.4, Emacs doesn't work properly if configured for
1049the Motif toolkit and linked against the free LessTif library. The
1050next Emacs release is expected to work with LessTif.
1051
1052* Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1053
1054This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1055a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1056likely to cause it.
1057
1058We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1059
1060* Emacs makes HPUX 11.0 crash.
1061
1062This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1063
1064* Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine (HPUX 10.20).
1065
1066This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
1067
1068* The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
1069Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
1070`add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
1071'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
1072
1073* Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
1074(alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
1075Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
1076earlier versions.
1077
1078--- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
1079+++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
1080@@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
1081 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
1082 (cond
1083 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
1084- (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
1085+ (insert-file-contents entity)
1086 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
1087 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
1088 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
1089
d238f982
EZ
1090* Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUC TeX installed.
1091
1092Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUC TeX; upgrading should solve
1093these problems.
1094
d7185f9d
EZ
1095* No colors in AUC TeX with Emacs 21.
1096
1097Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
1098byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
1099
d238f982 1100* Running TeX from AUC TeX package with Emacs 20.3 gives a Lisp error
a933dad1
DL
1101about a read-only tex output buffer.
1102
1103This problem appeared for AUC TeX version 9.9j and some earlier
1104versions. Here is a patch for the file tex-buf.el in the AUC TeX
1105package.
1106
1107diff -c auctex/tex-buf.el~ auctex/tex-buf.el
1108*** auctex/tex-buf.el~ Wed Jul 29 18:35:32 1998
1109--- auctex/tex-buf.el Sat Sep 5 15:20:38 1998
1110***************
1111*** 545,551 ****
1112 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1113 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1114 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1115! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer)
1116 (set-buffer buffer)
1117 (if dir (cd dir))
1118 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1119- --- 545,552 ----
1120 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1121 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1122 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1123! (let (temp-buffer-show-function temp-buffer-show-hook)
1124! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer))
1125 (set-buffer buffer)
1126 (if dir (cd dir))
1127 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1128
1129* On Irix 6.3, substituting environment variables in file names
1130in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
1131
1132 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
1133
1134This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
1135003082 August 11, 1998.
1136
1137* After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1138
1139The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1140 (standard-display-european t)
1141That should be changed to
1142 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1143
1144* Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
1145
1146You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
1147supplies the `install-info' command.
1148
1149* Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key, on HPUX.
1150
1151To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1152rights, containing this text:
1153
1154--------------------------------
1155xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1156keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1157keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1158EOF
1159
1160xmodmap - << EOF
1161clear mod1
1162keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1163add mod1 = Meta_L
1164keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1165add mod2 = Mode_switch
1166EOF
1167--------------------------------
1168
17a37d87
EZ
1169* Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1170
62c485d2
GM
1171This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1172requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1173of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1174which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1175while, Emacs will print a message:
17a37d87
EZ
1176
1177 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1178
62c485d2 1179A workaround is to not use `klipper'.
17a37d87 1180
a933dad1
DL
1181* Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
1182in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
1183drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
1184
1185This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
1186device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
1187work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
1188
1189* M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1190
1191See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1192for character composition.
1193
1194* Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
1195
1196This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
1197full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
1198/etc/hosts file, something like this:
1199
1200127.0.0.1 localhost
1201129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
1202
1203The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
1204
1205* Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs on Digital Unix 4.0.
1206
1207So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
1208is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
1209properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
1210`tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
1211in Emacs.
1212
1213* When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
1214
3d00585e
EZ
1215This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
1216characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
1217characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
1218support for 8-bit characters.
a933dad1 1219
3d00585e
EZ
1220To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
1221this at your shell's prompt:
1222
1223 ispell -vv
1224
1225and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
1226"!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
1227does not.
1228
1229To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
1230in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
1231Then rebuild the speller.
1232
1233Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
1234version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
1235
1236Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
1237in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
1238Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
1239it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
1240spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
a933dad1
DL
1241
1242* On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
12435.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1244
1245This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1246One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1247known to work.
1248
1249* On Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
1250CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
1251
1252This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
1253
1254Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
1255events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
1256distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
1257combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
c24be289
JR
1258AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
1259to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
a933dad1
DL
1260
1261* Under some Windows X-servers, Emacs' display is incorrect
1262
1263The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
1264screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
1265display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
1266to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
1267
e9a0a549
EZ
1268This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
1269as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
1270problem lies in the X-server settings.
a933dad1
DL
1271
1272There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
1273running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
1274un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
1275selection".
1276
1277Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
1278please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
1279If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
1280here.
1281
1282* On Solaris 2, Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
1283
1284The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
1285Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
1286(Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
1287You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
1288You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
1289look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
1290are currently recommended for your host.
1291
1292On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
1293105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
1294105284-18 might fix it again.
1295
3156909f
PE
1296* On Solaris 2.6 and 7, the Compose key does not work.
1297
1298This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
1299the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
1300support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
1301If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
a933dad1
DL
1302
1303One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
1304For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
1305variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
1306lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
1307should do.
1308
3156909f
PE
1309pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
1310if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
1311libraries.
a933dad1 1312
e96c5c69
JD
1313* Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1314
1315This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1316seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1317To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1318and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1319
a933dad1
DL
1320* Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
1321
1322You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
1323either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
1324calls for specifying this.
1325
1326If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
1327mail-host-address to the value you want.
1328
1329* Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs, on UnixWare 2.1
1330
1331Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
1332virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
1333the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
1334error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
1335exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
1336memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
1337
1338You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
1339But you have to be root to do it.
1340
1341According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
1342
1343 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
1344 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
1345 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
1346 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
1347 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
1348
1349(He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
1350These changes take effect when you reboot.
1351
1352* Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1353
1354We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1355scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1356happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1357on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1358
1359Here's how to do this:
1360
1361 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1362
1363If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1364try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1365to normal, do
1366
1367 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1368
1369* Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
1370
1371Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
1372supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
1373many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
1374
1375If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
1376server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
1377You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
1378
1379The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
1380display all the characters Emacs supports.
1381
4c635a29
DL
1382Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
1383missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
1384character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
1385but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
1386of this character to display a space.
1387
a933dad1
DL
1388* Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
1389
1390You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
1391
1392* Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
1393
1394This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
1395than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
1396lines do not overlap.
1397
1398* You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
1399video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
1400
1401This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
1402your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
1403check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
1404
1405* In FreeBSD 2.1.5, useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1406directories that have the +t bit.
1407
1408This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1409Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1410with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1411link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1412
1413If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1414file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1415
1416* When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1417commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1418
1419You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1420
1421 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1422
1423* Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
1424appear on disk.
1425
1426This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
1427remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
1428implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
1429detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
1430calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
1431where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
1432
1433* "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
1434
1435If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
1436will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
1437in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
1438did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
1439character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
1440must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
1441
1442You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
1443them to two different keys.
1444
1445* Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup, on AIX4.2.
1446
1447If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
1448without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
1449
1450* movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
1451
1452Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
1453NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
1454entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
1455listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
1456the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
1457old POP protocol.
1458
1459* Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
1460
1461This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
1462use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
1463an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
1464happens to exist on your X server).
1465
1466* Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
1467
1468This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
1469prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
1470to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
1471
1472Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
1473(src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
1474
1475* Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on HPUX 9 after you delete a frame.
1476
1477We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
1478the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
1479does not happen.
1480
1481* Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1482
1483We suspect that this is a similar bug in the X libraries provided by
1484Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1485makes the problem stop:
1486
1487105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1488105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1489106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1490105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1491
1492Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1493suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1494
1495106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1496106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1497105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1498
1499* Problems running Perl under Emacs on Windows NT/95.
1500
1501`perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
1502The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
1503
1504The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
1505"CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
1506with the user.
1507
1508On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
1509pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
1510communicate with the subprocess.
1511
1512On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
1513relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
1514redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
1515stdin.
1516
1517A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
1518
1519For Perl 4:
1520
1521 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
1522 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
1523 ***************
1524 *** 68,74 ****
1525 $rcfile=".perldb";
1526 }
1527 else {
1528 ! $console = "con";
1529 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1530 }
1531
1532 --- 68,74 ----
1533 $rcfile=".perldb";
1534 }
1535 else {
1536 ! $console = "";
1537 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1538 }
1539
1540
1541 For Perl 5:
1542 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
1543 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
1544 ***************
1545 *** 22,28 ****
1546 $rcfile=".perldb";
1547 }
1548 elsif (-e "con") {
1549 ! $console = "con";
1550 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1551 }
1552 else {
1553 --- 22,28 ----
1554 $rcfile=".perldb";
1555 }
1556 elsif (-e "con") {
1557 ! $console = "";
1558 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1559 }
1560 else {
1561
a933dad1
DL
1562* Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs:
1563
1564There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
1565
1566 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
1567 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
1568 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
1569
1570To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
1571subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
1572them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
1573incorrect library functions.
1574
f1e54ce1
EZ
1575* When compiling with DJGPP on Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
1576
1577If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
1578Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
1579program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
1580config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
1581the front of your PATH environment variable.
1582
a933dad1
DL
1583* When compiling with DJGPP on Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
1584like make-docfile.
1585
1586This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
1587variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
1588compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
1589the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
1590
1591* Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
1592run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
a01325b8
EZ
1593
1594Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
a933dad1
DL
1595immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
1596the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
a01325b8
EZ
1597and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
1598
1599Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
1600the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
1601Lisp.
a933dad1
DL
1602
1603This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
1604support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
1605characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
1606You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
1607filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
1608compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
1609explains this issue in more detail.
1610
a01325b8
EZ
1611Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
1612MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
1613by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
1614unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
1615them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
1616must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
1617properly truncated.
1618
a933dad1
DL
1619* Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
1620
1621 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
1622
1623This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
1624on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
1625value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
1626works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
1627support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
1628undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
1629[emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
1630`TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
1631your system works as before.
1632
1633* On Windows 95, Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
1634
1635This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
1636You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
1637
c24be289 1638* Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on Windows.
a933dad1
DL
1639
1640This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1641you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
c24be289
JR
1642and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
1643more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
1644or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
a933dad1
DL
1645
1646* `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
1647
1648This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
1649version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
1650definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
1651incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
1652does not work with this version of ncurses.
1653
1654The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
1655
1656* Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
1657
1658Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
1659editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
1660as GCC.
1661
1662* Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly truncated
1663on GNU/Linux systems.
1664
1665This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
16661.3.75.
1667
1668* Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1669
1670There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1671caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1672problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1673is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1674
1675Using the old library version is a workaround.
1676
1677* On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
1678
1679This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
1680version of Solaris that you are using.
1681
1682* Emacs dumps core on startup, on Solaris.
1683
1684Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
1685102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
1686Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
1687by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
1688However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
1689
1690Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
1691you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
1692We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
1693for certain.
1694
1695 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
1696 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
1697 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
1698
1699(One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
1700with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
1701
1702If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
1703bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1704
1705Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
1706Solaris 2.5.
1707
1708* Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called, on Solaris.
1709
1710If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
1711of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
1712called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
1713
1714* "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes on HPUX, in
1715Emacs built with Motif.
1716
1717This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1718such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1719
1720* On Irix 6.0, make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi
1721
1722A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
1723in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
1724find that string, and take out the spaces.
1725
1726Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
1727
1728* "out of virtual swap space" on Irix 5.3
1729
1730This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
1731many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
1732swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
1733can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
1734command `swap -l'.
1735
1736You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
1737line like this:
1738
1739/usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
1740
1741where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
1742by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
1743that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
1744new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
1745information.
1746
1747The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
1748swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
1749on the network that can log on to the host.
1750
1751If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
1752the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
1753some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
1754icons.
1755
1756You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
1757FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
1758("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
1759ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
1760
1761* With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
1762character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
1763
1764One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
1765away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
1766XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
1767
1768* On SunOS 4.1.3, Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
1769
1770This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
1771on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
1772version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
1773it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
1774
1775* On SunOS 4, Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
1776(or log out, if you logged in using X).
1777
1778Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
1779
1780* On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1781with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1782
1783On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1784`unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1785Definitions" to make them defined.
1786
1787* On SunOS, you get linker errors
1788 ld: Undefined symbol
1789 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
1790 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
1791
1792The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
1793or link libXmu statically.
1794
1795* On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as
1796 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
1797 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
1798
1799This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
1800these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
1801you build Emacs:
1802
1803 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
1804 chmod 664 libIM.a
1805 ranlib libIM.a
1806
1807Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
1808Makefile).
1809
1810* Unpredictable segmentation faults on Solaris 2.3 and 2.4.
1811
1812A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
1813the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
1814
1815We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
1816
1817* Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for
1818Windows.
1819
1820A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
1821Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
1822problem.
1823
1824* Emacs crashes at startup on MSDOS.
1825
1826Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
1827and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
1828know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
1829memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
1830However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
1831
1832You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
1833arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
1834information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
1835is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
1836
1837Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
1838configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
1839removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
1840and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
1841the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
1842
1843* A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
1844
1845twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
1846You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
1847
1848 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
1849
1850* Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
1851
1852This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
1853the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
1854Emacs's configure script.
1855
1856* Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
1857
1858This results from a bug in GNU Sed version 2.03. To solve the
1859problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
1860configure script.
1861
1862* On Sunos 4.1.1, there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
1863
1864If you get errors such as
1865
1866 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1867 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1868 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
1869
1870This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
1871to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
1872script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
1873make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
1874ones available when you build Emacs.
1875
1876* The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1877other non-English HP keyboards too).
1878
1879This is because HPUX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1880shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1881configures the X server.
1882
1883 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1884 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1885 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1886 EOF
1887
1888 xmodmap - << EOF
1889 clear mod1
1890 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1891 add mod1 = Meta_L
1892 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1893 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1894 EOF
1895
1896* The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
1897
1898Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
1899command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
1900Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
1901manager to use some other command. You can disable the
1902shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
1903
1904 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
1905
1906* Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1907
1908There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1909that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1910
1911* Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys.
1912
1913The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
1914be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
1915to allocate ptys reliably.
1916
1917* On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
1918
1919The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
1920Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
1921compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
1922workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
1923syms.h.
1924
1925* Slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1926
1927People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1928startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1929
1930This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1931Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1932improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1933networked and non-networked machines.
1934
1935Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1936
1937** Networked Case
1938
1939First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1940exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1941(replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1942
1943 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
1944
1945Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1946lines:
1947
1948 order hosts, bind
1949 multi on
1950
1951Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1952indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1953database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1954dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1955
1956** Non-Networked Case
1957
1958The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1959However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1960simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1961`touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1962file is not necessary with this approach.
1963
1964* On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
1965forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
1966
1967casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
1968after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
1969
1970 #if ThreadedX
1971 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
1972 #endif
1973
1974to:
1975
1976 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
1977 #if ThreadedX
1978 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
1979 #endif
1980 #endif
1981
1982Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
1983(as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
1984OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
1985Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
1986definition for your type of machine and system.
1987
1988Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
1989the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
1990Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
1991
1992For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
1993101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
1994to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
1995patch.
1996
1997However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
1998he changed
1999 #define ThreadedX YES
2000to
2001 #define ThreadedX NO
2002in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
2003`-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
2004typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
2005
2006* With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
2007 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
2008
2009This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
2010with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
2011another escape character in kermit. One user did
2012
2013 set escape-character 17
2014
2015in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
2016
2017* The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
2018
2019This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
2020
2021 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
2022
2023That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
2024do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
2025explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
2026the resource prevents the problem.
2027
2028* Emacs gets hung shortly after startup, on Sunos 4.1.3.
2029
2030We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2031one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2032
2033100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2034100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2035100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2036100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2037100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2038
2039We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2040which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2041
2042* Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
2043
2044This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
2045installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
2046specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
2047corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
2048the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
2049Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
2050files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
2051original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
2052not to work.
2053
2054The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
2055when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
2056is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
2057same directory where system header files are kept.
2058
2059* On Solaris 2.x, GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported"
2060
2061This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2062are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2063does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2064later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2065described in the Solaris FAQ
2066<http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2067to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
2068
2069* The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
2070
2071This shell command should fix it:
2072
2073 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
2074
2075* Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
2076
2077On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
2078with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
2079version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
2080C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
2081GCC.
2082
2083* On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2084
2085This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2086for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2087/usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2088
2089* You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
2090
2091On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
2092works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
2093bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
2094the Files menu).
2095
2096This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
2097due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
2098knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
2099workaround can be found.
2100
2101* Unusable default font on SCO 3.2v4.
2102
2103The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
2104that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
2105fonts, so it does not work.
2106
2107This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
2108the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
2109emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
2110that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
2111resources affect Emacs also:
2112
2113 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
2114 *Background: scoBackground
2115 *Foreground: scoForeground
2116
2117The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
2118Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
2119
2120 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
2121 Emacs*Background: white
2122 Emacs*Foreground: black
2123
2124(These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
2125suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
2126starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
2127environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
2128as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
2129/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
2130but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
2131Open Desktop display.
2132
2133These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
2134machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
2135
2136* rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
2137
2138This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
2139The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
2140
2141* Emacs is slow using X11R5 on HP/UX.
2142
2143This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2144doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2145because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2146libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2147those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2148install them and rebuild Emacs.
2149
2150* Loading fonts is very slow.
2151
2152You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
2153Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
2154directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
2155"fonts.scale".
2156
2157If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
2158font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
2159
2160With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
2161directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
2162Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
2163
2164* On AIX 3.2.4, releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2165
2166Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2167ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2168lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2169treated as control characters.
2170
2171You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2172releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2173
2174* display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2175
2176Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2177versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2178cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2179This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2180processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2181
2182Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2183the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2184
2185The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2186
2187* On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2188
2189This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2190C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2191
2192* Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
2193 segmentation fault and core dump.
2194
2195This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
2196added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
2197
2198 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
2199
2200If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
2201untar it :-).
2202
2203* Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2204
2205To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2206
2207 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2208
2209and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2210
2211The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2212cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2213
2214* Link failure on IBM AIX 1.3 ptf 0013.
2215
2216There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2217the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2218workaround/fix is:
2219
2220 cd /lib
2221 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2222 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2223
2224* Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose on a Sun.
2225
2226If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
2227with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
2228the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
2229libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
2230toolkit.)
2231
2232If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
2233lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
2234X11R4, then use it in the link.
2235
2236* Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'
2237
2238This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2239Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2240Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2241where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2242
2243So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2244
2245* In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
2246
2247This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
2248smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
2249on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
2250problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
2251
2252 if ($?EMACS) then
2253 if ($EMACS == "t") then
2254 unset edit
2255 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
2256 endif
2257 endif
2258
2259* An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
2260parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
2261
2262This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
2263 emacs*Cursor: black
2264(which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
2265that isn't a color.)
2266
2267The fix is to correct your X resources.
2268
2269* Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1 using --with-x-toolkit.
2270
2271If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
2272_iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
2273-lXaw in the command that links temacs.
2274
2275This problem seems to arise only when the international language
2276extensions to X11R5 are installed.
2277
2278* Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
2279
2280This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
2281to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
2282Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
2283
2284* src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2285
2286This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2287had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.
2288
2289* Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
2290
2291If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
2292resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
2293renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
2294font.
2295
2296One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
2297your font path, like this:
2298
2299 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
2300
2301* Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
2302
2303An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
2304
2305 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
2306
2307This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
2308individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
2309want, rewrite the resource.
2310
2311To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
2312-query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
2313the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
2314
2315* --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
2316
2317On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
2318unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
2319toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
2320libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
2321unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
2322and Solaris in version 19.29.
2323
2324* `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2325
2326This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2327commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2328Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2329hand.
2330
2331* --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong on BSD/386.
2332
2333This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
2334The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
2335such as bash.
2336
2337* Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies, on Sunos 5.3.
2338
2339A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2340exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2341applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2342communicating through pipes.
2343
2344* Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2345
2346Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2347sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2348delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2349program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2350means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2351command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2352obtain the destination address.
2353
2354There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2355In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2356non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
23572.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
23584.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2359have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2360of this writing, these official versions are available:
2361
2362 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2363 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2364 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2365 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2366 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2367
2368 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2369 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2370
2371* On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs:
2372
2373 Could not load program emacs
2374 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2375 Error was: Exec format error
2376
2377or this one:
2378
2379 Could not load program .emacs
2380 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2381 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2382 Error was: Exec format error
2383
2384These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2385compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2386
2387* On AIX, you get this compiler error message:
2388
2389 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2390 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2391
2392This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2393libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2394X11Dev... with smit.
2395
2396* You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
2397
2398This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
2399Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
2400character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
2401to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
2402
2403For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
2404
2405 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
2406
2407If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
2408Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
2409xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
2410
2411* C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
2412
2413You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
2414though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
2415or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
2416
2417* Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
2418
2419These control the actions of Emacs.
2420~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
2421EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
2422"load" will search.
2423
2424If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
2425of them, then try again.
2426
2427* After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2428
2429Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2430mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2431the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2432
2433Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2434you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2435operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2436configure script) that reads:
2437#define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2438This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2439the kernel bug.
2440
2441* Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
2442directly with an X server.
2443
2444If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
2445does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
2446whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
2447followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
2448it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
2449have made the key binding correctly.
2450
2451If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
2452be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
2453server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
2454default.
2455
2456If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
2457
2458 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
2459 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
2460
2461If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
2462commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
2463are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
2464modifier bit not otherwise used.
2465
2466If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
2467keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
2468some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
2469commands show above to make them modifier keys.
2470
2471Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
2472into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
2473
2474* `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'
2475
2476On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
2477file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
2478does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
2479value is just ten seconds.
2480
2481If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
2482
2483* `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2484
2485On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2486in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2487expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2488in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2489
2490The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2491anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2492
2493I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2494going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2495Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2496in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2497
2498* On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2499
2500Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2501the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2502sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2503
2504* Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2505
2506Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2507
2508* Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
2509the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
2510* Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
2511* GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
2512
2513This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
2514libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
2515shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
2516similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
2517
2518The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
2519the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
2520
2521The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
2522installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
2523
2524On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
2525
2526If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
2527then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
2528do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
2529or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
2530that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
2531be careful not to lose the others.
2532
2533Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
2534
2535#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
2536
2537Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
2538the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
2539again to say this:
2540
2541#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
2542
2543* On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
2544
2545 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
2546
2547The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
2548
2549The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
2550
2551* Self documentation messages are garbled.
2552
2553This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
2554with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
2555corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
2556
2557* Trouble using ptys on AIX.
2558
2559People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2560Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2561
2562* Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
2563
2564christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
2565
2566The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
2567execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
2568tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
2569but tty is giving it back 3.
2570
2571The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
2572word:
2573
2574if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
2575
2576should be changed to:
2577
2578if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
2579
2580Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
2581and into .login.
2582
2583* Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
2584
2585Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
2586
2587* Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
2588* `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
2589
2590One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
2591your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
2592the environment.
2593
2594* Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
2595
2596If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
2597`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
2598that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
2599with a floating point option other than the default.
2600
2601It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
2602crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
2603However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
2604floating point option: -fsoft.
2605
2606* Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
2607
2608The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
2609arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
2610tell Emacs to compensate for this.
2611
2612I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
2613whether this problem is present on a given system.
2614
2615* Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
2616 as a concentrator.
2617
2618This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
26197 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
2620
2621* M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2622
2623This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2624version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2625
2626* Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
2627 terminal type.
2628
2629The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
2630environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
2631provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
2632emulates.
2633
2634Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
2635in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
2636it only if it is undefined.
2637
2638 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
2639
2640Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
2641happen in a non-login shell.
2642
2643* X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
2644
2645People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
2646not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
2647the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
2648the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
2649
2650You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
2651However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
2652you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
2653
2654The easy way to do this is to put
2655
2656 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
2657
2658in your site-init.el file.
2659
2660* Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2661
2662On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2663may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2664is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2665As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2666
2667* Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
2668
2669You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2670
2671 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2672
2673This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2674Here is how to make more of them.
2675
2676 % cd /dev
2677 % ls pty*
2678 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2679 % /etc/crpty 8
2680 # creates eight new pty's
2681
2682* Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
2683
2684This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2685Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2686
2687It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2688space available on the machine.
2689
2690On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2691subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2692for large blocks (many pages).
2693
2694* test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
2695* or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
2696* or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2697* or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs
2698
2699This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2700fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2701binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2702
2703In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2704It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2705a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2706itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2707when unpacking the shell archive.
2708
2709I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2710what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2711file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2712
2713If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2714nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2715
2716 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2717 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2718 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2719 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2720 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2721 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2722 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2723 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2724 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2725 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2726 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2727 and remake temacs.
2728 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2729
2730* temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
2731
2732This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2733files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2734space than was allocated.
2735
2736This could be caused by
2737 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2738 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2739 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2740 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2741 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2742 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2743 deleting that file.
2744 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2745 (not from the directory you expected).
2746 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2747 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2748 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2749 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2750 the space required.
2751
2752If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2753of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2754
2755But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2756of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2757problem.
2758
2759* Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
2760
2761You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
2762Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
2763will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
2764and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
2765
2766Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
2767than the corresponding .el file.
2768
2769* The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2770
2771Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2772
27731) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2774as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2775it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2776value in the man page for a.out (5).
2777
27782) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2779initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2780of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2781not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2782may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2783
2784* Compilation errors on VMS.
2785
2786You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
2787variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
2788This is not an error. Ignore it.
2789
2790VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
2791were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
2792
2793There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
2794in conditional expressions. The bug is:
2795 char c = -1, d = 1;
2796 int i;
2797
2798 i = d ? c : d;
2799The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
2800conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
2801constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
2802
2803* rmail gets error getting new mail
2804
2805rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
2806called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
2807the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
2808
2809There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
2810the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
2811`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
2812this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
2813the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
2814IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
2815SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
2816
2817If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2818prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2819you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2820`mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
2821
2822 chgrp mail movemail
2823 chmod 2755 movemail
2824
2825If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2826prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2827you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2828`mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
2829make install.
2830
2831 chgrp mail movemail
2832 chmod 2755 movemail
2833
2834Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
2835installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
2836installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
2837/usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
2838mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
2839directory copy is ineffective.
2840
2841* Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
2842
2843This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
2844used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
2845away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
2846streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
2847user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
2848properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
2849input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
2850easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
2851
2852There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
2853
2854 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
2855 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
2856 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
2857
2858First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
2859they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
2860"no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
2861escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
2862and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
2863control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
2864
2865Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
2866needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
2867by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
2868rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
2869your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
2870it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
2871the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
2872problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
2873to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
2874
2875For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
2876giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
2877codes. You might as well try it.
2878
2879If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
2880through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
2881computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
2882much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
2883control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
2884you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
2885replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
2886measures can make Emacs semi-work.
2887
2888You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
2889handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
2890enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
2891now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
2892enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
2893control handling.)
2894
2895If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
2896is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
2897other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
2898and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
2899other control characters are already used by emacs.
2900
2901IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
2902Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
2903order to continue.
2904
2905If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
2906certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
2907`enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
2908automatically. Here is an example:
2909
2910(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
2911
2912If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
2913and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
2914manually.
2915
2916I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
2917assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
2918control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
2919merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
2920widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
2921use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
2922will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
2923of inferior systems.
2924
2925* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
2926
2927For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
2928control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
2929terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
2930that wants to use flow control.
2931
2932You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
2933If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
2934flow control, as described in the preceding section.
2935
2936If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
2937into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
2938shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
2939
2940* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
2941
2942Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
2943control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
2944On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
2945control on the local system.
2946
2947One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
2948(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
2949stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
2950"stty start u stop u" will do this.
2951
2952Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
2953around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
2954issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
2955
2956If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
2957M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
2958if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
2959following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
2960
2961(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
2962
2963See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
2964info.
2965
2966* Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
2967
2968This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
2969terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
2970the combination of features specified for that terminal.
2971
2972The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
2973Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
2974(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
2975terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
2976what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
2977and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
2978There are several possibilities:
2979
29801) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
2981
2982In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
2983need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
2984
29852) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
2986 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
2987 by termcap.
2988
2989This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
2990Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
2991and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
2992classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
2993Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
2994tested on many kinds of terminals.
2995
29963) The termcap entry is wrong.
2997
2998See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
2999that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
3000for certain terminals.
3001
30024) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
3003 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
3004
3005This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
3006in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
3007
3008* Output from Control-V is slow.
3009
3010On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
3011Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
3012to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
3013before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
3014the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
3015it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
3016
3017If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
3018that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
3019specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
3020concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
3021send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
3022fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
3023time as the operations really take.
3024
3025Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
3026at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
3027terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
3028operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
3029flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
3030an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
3031Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
3032cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
3033not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
3034is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
3035
3036Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
3037multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
3038termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
3039fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
3040each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
3041to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
3042`cm' string.
3043
3044You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
3045has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
3046take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
3047
3048A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
3049of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
3050
3051* Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
3052
3053The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
3054
3055 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
3056 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
3057
3058This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
3059
3060* You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
3061
3062Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
3063after a day or two.
3064
3065The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
3066the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
3067character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
3068of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
3069overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
3070to it.
3071
3072For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
3073and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
3074other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
3075but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
3076that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
3077important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
3078
3079If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
3080you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
3081 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
3082You can probably access help-command via f1.
3083
3084* Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
3085It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
3086but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
3087causes it.
3088
3089 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
3090 call in the RFS server.
3091
3092 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
3093 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
3094 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
3095 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
3096
3097 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
3098
3099 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
3100 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
3101 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
3102 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
3103 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
3104 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
3105 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
3106
3107 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
3108
3109 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3110 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
3111 retrieving revision 1.2
3112 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3113 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
3114 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
3115 ***************
3116 *** 163,169 ****
3117 /*
3118 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3119 */
3120 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
3121 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3122 else
3123 {
3124 --- 166,172 ----
3125 /*
3126 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3127 */
3128 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
3129 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3130 else
3131 {
3132
3133* Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3134
3135You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3136
3137 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3138 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3139
3140These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3141Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3142may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3143on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3144in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3145can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3146that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3147
3148As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3149you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3150can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3151should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3152array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3153 Lisp_Object *args;
3154 ...
3155 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3156putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3157 Lisp_Object *args;
3158 Lisp_Object tem;
3159 ...
3160 tem = args[i];
3161 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3162causes the problem to go away.
3163The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3164so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3165
3166* 68000 C compiler problems
3167
3168Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3169These are some that have been observed.
3170
3171** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3172This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3173if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3174
3175** "cannot reclaim" error.
3176
3177This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3178line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3179simpler expressions.
3180
3181** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3182
3183If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3184Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3185
3186struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3187
3188lose (arg)
3189 struct foo arg;
3190{
3191 test ((int *) arg.y);
3192}
3193
3194If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3195In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3196((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3197
3198This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3199of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3200
3201* C compilers lose on returning unions
3202
3203I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3204Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3205defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3206
3207This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3208of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3209
53854552
EZ
3210\f
3211Local variables:
3212mode: outline
3213paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3214end: