Added support in etags for the Lua script language.
[bpt/emacs.git] / etc / PROBLEMS
CommitLineData
a933dad1 1This file describes various problems that have been encountered
0a4dd4e4 2in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
9dc15871 3and browsing through the outline headers.
a933dad1 4
9dc15871 5* Emacs startup failures
32364f49 6
9dc15871 7** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
32364f49 8
9dc15871 9A typical error message might be something like
32364f49 10
9dc15871 11 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
984002eb 12
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13This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
14Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
15are:
984002eb 16
9dc15871 17 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
984002eb 18
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19 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
20 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
21 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
984002eb 22
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23One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
24fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
25the problematic line(s) and correct them.
984002eb 26
9dc15871 27** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
984002eb 28
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29This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
30installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
31specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
32corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
33the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
34Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
35files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
36original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
37not to work.
984002eb 38
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39The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
40when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
41is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
42same directory where system header files are kept.
984002eb 43
9dc15871 44** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
984002eb 45
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46If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
47systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
48ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
49cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
50libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
51obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
f16a1bf6 52
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53The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
54the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
55symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
56it constitutes a separate package.
f16a1bf6 57
9dc15871 58** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
5b4ffca2 59
9dc15871 60The typical error message might be like this:
5b4ffca2 61
9dc15871 62 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
24efe898 63
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64This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
65tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
66files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
67Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
68when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
69required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
70it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
24efe898 71
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72Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
73file could fail to load if it is compressed.
24efe898 74
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75The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
76file.
f0f62f71 77
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78Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
79lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
80print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
f0f62f71 81
9dc15871 82 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
f0f62f71 83
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84If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
85and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
86load-path.
fc1bfc2a 87
9dc15871 88** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
fc1bfc2a 89
9dc15871 90An example of such an error is:
fc1bfc2a 91
9dc15871 92 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
60f553d2 93
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94This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
95The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
96present in load-path:
3f82efb4 97
9dc15871 98 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
3f82efb4 99
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100If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
101and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
102load-path.
3f82efb4 103
9dc15871 104** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
3f82efb4 105
9dc15871 106Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
cc305a60 107
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108 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
109 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
110 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
111 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
112 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
113 /******************************************************************
cc305a60 114
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115 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
116 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
117 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
118 XLCd lcd;
119 {
120 - char* begin;
121 - char* end;
122 + char* begin = NULL;
123 + char* end = NULL;
124 char* ret;
125 int i = 0;
126 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
127 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
128 }
129 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
130 if (ret != NULL) {
131 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
132 + if (begin != NULL) {
133 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
134 + } else {
135 + ret[0] = '\0';
136 + }
137 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
138 }
139 return ret;
fc2938d1 140
9dc15871 141* Crash bugs
fc2938d1 142
9dc15871 143** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
177c0ea7 144
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145This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
146use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
147an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
148happens to exist on your X server).
fc2938d1 149
9dc15871 150** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
fc2938d1 151
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152This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
153prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
154to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
2aa82bcf 155
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156Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
157(src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
2aa82bcf 158
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159** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
160a segmentation fault and core dump.
c93bdf05 161
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162This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
163added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
4593687f 164
9dc15871 165 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
9272ccfc 166
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167If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
168untar it :-).
9272ccfc 169
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170** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
171libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
172Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
173if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
174older version.
9272ccfc 175
9dc15871 176** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
7aa70236 177
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178This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
179terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
180If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
181version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
182and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
7aa70236 183
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184All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
185problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
186terminfo when built.
7c22dc9d 187
9dc15871 188** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
7c22dc9d 189
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190If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
191reported to prevent the crashes.
7c22dc9d 192
9dc15871 193** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
7c22dc9d 194
9dc15871 195It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
7c22dc9d 196
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197This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
198the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
199flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
200necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
677e7496 201
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202On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
203configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
677e7496 204
9dc15871 205* General runtime problems
677e7496 206
9dc15871 207** Lisp problems
677e7496 208
9dc15871 209*** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
677e7496 210
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211You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
212Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
213will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
214and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
677e7496 215
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216Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
217than the corresponding .el file.
9ed04369 218
9dc15871 219*** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
9ed04369 220
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221These control the actions of Emacs.
222~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
223EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
224"load" will search.
b87207a0 225
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226If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
227of them, then try again.
b87207a0 228
9dc15871 229*** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
177c0ea7 230
9dc15871 231The error message might be something like this:
177c0ea7 232
9dc15871 233 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
177c0ea7 234
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235This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
236built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
237for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
238corrects that.
177c0ea7 239
9dc15871 240*** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
b87207a0 241
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242Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
243problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
244documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
61638355 245
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246*** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
247Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
248`add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
249'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
61638355 250
9dc15871 251** Keyboard problems
a47a639f 252
9dc15871 253*** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
a47a639f 254
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255If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
256will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
257in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
258did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
259character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
260must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
a47a639f 261
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262You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
263them to two different keys.
a47a639f 264
9dc15871 265*** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
61638355 266
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267You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
268though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
269or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
61638355 270
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271*** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
272to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
61638355 273
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274This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
275with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
276another escape character in kermit. One user did
61638355 277
9dc15871 278 set escape-character 17
61638355 279
9dc15871 280in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
61638355 281
9dc15871 282** Mailers and other helper programs
61638355 283
9dc15871 284*** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
61638355 285
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286Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
287NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
288entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
289listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
290the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
291old POP protocol.
61638355 292
9dc15871 293*** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
61638355 294
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295RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
296called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
297the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
61638355 298
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299There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
300the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
301`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
302this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
303the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
304IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
305SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
61638355 306
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307If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
308prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
309you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
310`mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
61638355 311
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312 chgrp mail movemail
313 chmod 2755 movemail
61638355 314
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315If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
316prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
317you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
318`mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
319make install.
61638355 320
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321 chgrp mail movemail
322 chmod 2755 movemail
61638355 323
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324Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
325installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
326installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
327/usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
328mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
329directory copy is ineffective.
61638355 330
9dc15871 331*** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
61638355 332
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333This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
334The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
556a9fad 335
9dc15871 336** Problems with hostname resolution
61638355 337
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338*** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
339the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
340*** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
341*** GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
49172314 342
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343This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
344libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
345shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
346similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
96bde66b 347
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348The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
349the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
ed0d1d91 350
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351The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
352installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
6e1a66dc 353
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354On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
355
356If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
357then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
358do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
359or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
360that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
361be careful not to lose the others.
6e1a66dc 362
9dc15871 363Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
3c418e54 364
9dc15871 365#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
3c418e54 366
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367Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
368the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
369again to say this:
3c418e54 370
9dc15871 371#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
f9130829 372
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373*** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
374
375You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
376either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
377calls for specifying this.
378
379If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
380mail-host-address to the value you want.
381
382** NFS and RFS
383
384*** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
385appear on disk.
386
387This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
388remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
389implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
390detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
391calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
392where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
393
394*** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
395It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
396but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
397causes it.
398
399 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
400 call in the RFS server.
401
402 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
403 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
404 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
405 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
406
407 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
408
409 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
410 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
411 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
412 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
413 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
414 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
415 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
416
417 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
418
419 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
420 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
421 retrieving revision 1.2
422 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
423 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
424 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
425 ***************
426 *** 163,169 ****
427 /*
428 * No return sent for close or fsync!
429 */
430 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
431 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
432 else
433 {
434 --- 166,172 ----
435 /*
436 * No return sent for close or fsync!
437 */
438 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
439 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
440 else
441 {
442
443** PSGML
444
445*** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
446`before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
447longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
448
449*** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
450
451PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
452as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
453of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
454sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
455HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
456(from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
457(for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
458
459*** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
460(alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
461Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
462earlier versions.
463
464--- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
465+++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
466@@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
467 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
468 (cond
469 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
470- (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
471+ (insert-file-contents entity)
472 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
473 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
474 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
475
90a02640 476** AUCTeX
9dc15871 477
90a02640
DK
478You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
479it.
9dc15871 480
90a02640
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481*** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
482
483Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
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484these problems.
485
90a02640 486*** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
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487
488Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
489byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
490
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491** Miscellaneous problems
492
493*** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
494
495This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
496with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
497corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
498
499*** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
500terminal type.
501
502The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
503environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
504provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
505emulates.
506
507Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
508in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
509it only if it is undefined.
510
511 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
512
513Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
514happen in a non-login shell.
515
516*** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
517
518This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
519smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
520on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
521problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
522
523 if ($?EMACS) then
524 if ($EMACS == "t") then
525 unset edit
526 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
527 endif
528 endif
529
530*** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
531
532This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
533full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
534/etc/hosts file, something like this:
535
536127.0.0.1 localhost
537129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
538
539The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
540
541*** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
542
543If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
544representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
545ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
546version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
547systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
548ftp client. On a Debian system, type
549
550 update-alternatives --config ftp
551
552and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
553
554*** JPEG images aren't displayed.
555
556This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
557Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
558correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
559against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
560
561*** Dired is very slow.
562
563This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
564time. Possible reasons for this include:
565
566 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
567 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
568
569 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
570
571 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
572
573To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
574`directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
575invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
576(c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
577
578*** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
579under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
580
581*** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
582
583It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
584Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
585please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
586argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
587
588*** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
589
590This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
591defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
592runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
593
594The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
595
596*** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
597from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
598shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
599These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
600library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
601
602Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
603process invokes Emacs several times.
604
605On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
606environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
607can be found.
608
609Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
610Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
611specified run-time search path in the executable.
612
613On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
614linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
615backtraces like this:
616
617 (dbx) where
618 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]
619 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
620 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
621 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
622 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
623 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
624 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
625 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
626 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
627
628(`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
629happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
630forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
631to work around the problem.
632
633Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
634
635*** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
636video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
637
638This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
639your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
640check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
641
642*** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
643
644This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
645characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
646characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
647support for 8-bit characters.
648
649To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
650this at your shell's prompt:
651
652 ispell -vv
653
654and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
655"!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
656does not.
657
658To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
659in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
660Then rebuild the speller.
661
662Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
663version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
664
665Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
666in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
667Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
668it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
669spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
670
671If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
672you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
673can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
674in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
675
676* Runtime problems related to font handling
677
678** Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
679
680Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
681supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
682many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
683
684If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
685server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
686You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
f9130829 687
9dc15871
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688The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
689display all the characters Emacs supports.
f9130829 690
9dc15871
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691Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
692missing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur for
693character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
694but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
695of this character to display a space.
f9130829 696
9dc15871 697** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
f9130829 698
9dc15871 699You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
f9130829 700
9dc15871 701** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
f9130829 702
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703This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
704than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
705lines do not overlap.
ed85f61d 706
9dc15871 707** Loading fonts is very slow.
b300fd77 708
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709You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
710Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
711directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
712"fonts.scale".
b300fd77 713
9dc15871
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714If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
715font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
ed85f61d 716
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717With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
718directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
719Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
ed85f61d 720
9dc15871 721** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
fa2301bf 722
9dc15871
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723By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
724`{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
725any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
726vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
727parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
728in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
729pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
730introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
731through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
732to the end of a very large buffer.
ed85f61d 733
9dc15871
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734Beginning with version 21.4, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
735is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
736to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
737indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
d0cf6c7d 738
9dc15871
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739If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
740makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
741fontification by setting the variable
742`font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
743be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
d0cf6c7d 744
9dc15871
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745Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
746in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
d0cf6c7d 747
9dc15871
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748** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
749character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
d0cf6c7d 750
9dc15871
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751One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
752away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
753XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
c289e7f0 754
9dc15871 755** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
339b95d5 756
9dc15871
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757This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
758For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
759with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
760the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
761fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
762Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
763and then start the application again.
764If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
765application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
766of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
767sufficient to recompile Qt.
339b95d5 768
9dc15871 769** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
339b95d5 770
9dc15871
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771This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
7722.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
773event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
774Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
339b95d5 775
9dc15871 776A workaround for this is to add something like
b87207a0 777
9dc15871 778emacs.waitForWM: false
f936978f 779
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780to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
781frame's parameter list, like this:
6fb6f3ac 782
9dc15871 783 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
b87207a0 784
9dc15871 785(this should go into your `.emacs' file).
b87207a0 786
9dc15871 787** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
b87207a0 788
9dc15871
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789This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
790Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
791neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
792problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
793`.emacs'.
b87207a0 794
9dc15871
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795To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
796type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
797property.
e085efdb 798
9dc15871 799** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
fa99e2a4 800
9dc15871
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801When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
802(either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
803then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
804correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
805gives the appearance of "double spacing".
c8d9b4ee 806
9dc15871
EZ
807To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
808feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
fe445893 809
9dc15871 810* Internationalization problems
c8d9b4ee 811
9dc15871 812** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
d9810886 813
9dc15871
EZ
814XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
815minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
816name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
817according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
818characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
819able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
820C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
821font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
822include in the fontset spec:
d9810886 823
9dc15871
EZ
824mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
825mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
826mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
d04b2e49 827
9dc15871 828** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
d9810886 829
9dc15871
EZ
830Emacs by default only supports the parts of the Unicode BMP whose code
831points are in the ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff. This excludes: most
832of CJK, Yi and Hangul, as well as everything outside the BMP.
d9810886 833
9dc15871
EZ
834If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
835characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
836(composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
837correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
838If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
839substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
840information.
aa99760e 841
9dc15871
EZ
842To edit such UTF data, turn on Utf-Translate-Cjk mode, which makes
843many common CJK characters available for encoding and decoding and can
844be extended by updating the tables it uses. This also allows you to
845save as UTF buffers containing characters decoded by the chinese-,
846japanese- and korean- coding systems, e.g. cut and pasted from
847elsewhere.
aa99760e 848
9dc15871 849** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
aa99760e 850
9dc15871
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851Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
852library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
853following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
854though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
855distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
086b25d3 856
9dc15871
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857--- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
858+++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
859@@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
086b25d3 860
9dc15871
EZ
861 (mapcar
862 (lambda (x)
863- (mapcar
864- (lambda (y)
865- (mucs-define-coding-system
866- (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
867- (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
868- (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
869- (cdr x)))
870+ (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
871+ ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
872+ ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
873+ ;; system definitions.
874+ (let ((y (cadr x)))
875+ (mucs-define-coding-system
876+ (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
877+ (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
878+ (mapcar
879+ (lambda (y)
880+ (mucs-define-coding-system
881+ (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
882+ (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
883+ (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
884+ (cdr x)))
885 `((utf-8
886 (utf-8-unix
887 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
086b25d3 888
9dc15871
EZ
889Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
890Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
086b25d3 891
9dc15871 892** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
d6b7de9b
EZ
893
894Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
895other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
896that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
897size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
898when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
899fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
900
901To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
902
903 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
904
905If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
906problem.
907
908The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
909`fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
910`xset fp rehash'.
911
9dc15871 912** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
b87207a0 913
9dc15871
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914This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
915slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
916flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
917support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
918generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
b87207a0 919
9dc15871 920** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
4e0bd469 921
9dc15871
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922The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
923 (standard-display-european t)
924That should be changed to
925 (standard-display-european 1 t)
4e0bd469 926
9dc15871 927* X runtime problems
4e0bd469 928
9dc15871 929** X keyboard problems
4e0bd469 930
9dc15871 931*** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
4e0bd469 932
9dc15871
EZ
933This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
934Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
935character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
936to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
4e0bd469 937
9dc15871 938For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
61638355 939
9dc15871 940 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
61638355 941
9dc15871
EZ
942If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
943Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
944xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
61638355 945
9dc15871 946*** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
61638355 947
9dc15871 948Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
61638355 949
9dc15871 950*** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
61638355 951
9dc15871
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952See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
953for character composition.
a953a8d3 954
9dc15871 955*** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
2ebf6139 956
9dc15871
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957This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
958combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
959definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
960might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
961purposes.
ec383c7d 962
9dc15871
EZ
963We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
964you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
cc2f2825 965
9dc15871 966*** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1d297d9b 967
9dc15871
EZ
968These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
969particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
970configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
971configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
972change this.
8bd90f0a 973
9dc15871 974*** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
8bd90f0a 975
9dc15871
EZ
976This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
977a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
978--without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
8f4df059 979
9dc15871
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980*** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
981directly with an X server.
8f4df059 982
9dc15871
EZ
983If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
984does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
985whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
986followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
987it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
988have made the key binding correctly.
b098c23c 989
9dc15871
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990If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
991be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
992server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
993default.
224a0b4d 994
9dc15871 995If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
6343352f 996
9dc15871
EZ
997 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
998 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
6343352f 999
9dc15871
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1000If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1001commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1002are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1003modifier bit not otherwise used.
6343352f 1004
9dc15871
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1005If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1006keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1007some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1008commands show above to make them modifier keys.
6343352f 1009
9dc15871
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1010Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1011into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
cc2f2825 1012
9dc15871 1013** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
cc2f2825 1014
9dc15871 1015*** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
cc2f2825 1016
9dc15871
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1017A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1018into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1019incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1020other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1021been filed.
1f42cc71 1022
9dc15871
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1023*** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1024or messed up.
1f42cc71 1025
9dc15871
EZ
1026For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1027empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1028background.
1f42cc71 1029
9dc15871
EZ
1030This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1031definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1032solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1033option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1034is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1f42cc71 1035
9dc15871
EZ
1036Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1037applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1038(should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1039so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1040Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1041present or commented out:
f4f4ee4d 1042
9dc15871
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1043 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1044 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1045 Emacs*Foreground
1046 Emacs*Background
0cb26e21 1047
9dc15871 1048*** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
f4f4ee4d 1049
9dc15871
EZ
1050This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1051requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1052of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1053which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1054while, Emacs will print a message:
f4f4ee4d 1055
9dc15871 1056 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
c31138a1 1057
9dc15871 1058A workaround is to not use `klipper'.
c31138a1 1059
9dc15871 1060*** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
c31138a1 1061
9dc15871
EZ
1062This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1063seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1064To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1065and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
f4f4ee4d 1066
9dc15871
EZ
1067*** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1068click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1069is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1070problem disappears.
0c6456ad 1071
9dc15871
EZ
1072*** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1073XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1074one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1075For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1076"C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1077used with neXtaw at run time.
b1739b51 1078
9dc15871
EZ
1079The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1080want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1081built Emacs with.
b1739b51 1082
9dc15871 1083*** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
b1739b51 1084
9dc15871
EZ
1085When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1086graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1087and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1088file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
b1739b51 1089
9dc15871
EZ
1090The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1091for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
b1739b51 1092
9dc15871
EZ
1093Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1094but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1095the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
b1739b51 1096
9dc15871 1097*** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
e9a52cfe 1098
9dc15871
EZ
1099The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1100emulation for which it is set up.
e9a52cfe 1101
9dc15871
EZ
1102Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
1103Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
1104On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1105--enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1106successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1107lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1108menu placement.
e9a52cfe 1109
9dc15871
EZ
1110On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1111locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1112what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1113developers.
e9a52cfe 1114
9dc15871 1115*** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
e9a52cfe 1116
9dc15871 1117This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
e9a52cfe 1118
9dc15871 1119 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
e9a52cfe 1120
9dc15871
EZ
1121That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1122do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1123explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1124the resource prevents the problem.
f25eb4f7 1125
9dc15871 1126** General X problems
f25eb4f7 1127
9dc15871 1128*** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
f25eb4f7 1129
9dc15871
EZ
1130We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1131scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1132happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1133on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
f25eb4f7 1134
9dc15871 1135Here's how to do this:
f25eb4f7 1136
9dc15871 1137 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
f25eb4f7 1138
9dc15871
EZ
1139If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1140try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1141to normal, do
edd7d3be 1142
9dc15871 1143 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
edd7d3be 1144
9dc15871 1145*** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
edd7d3be 1146
9dc15871 1147The messages might say something like this:
42303132 1148
9dc15871 1149 Unable to load color "grey95"
42303132 1150
9dc15871 1151(typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
42303132 1152
9dc15871 1153 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
42303132 1154
9dc15871
EZ
1155These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1156many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1157resources to load all the colors it needs.
42303132 1158
9dc15871 1159A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
42303132 1160
9dc15871 1161*** Improving performance with slow X connections.
f3d6f4ee 1162
9dc15871
EZ
1163There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1164be carried out at the same time:
f3d6f4ee 1165
9dc15871
EZ
11661) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1167 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1168 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1169 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1170 package.
f3d6f4ee 1171
9dc15871
EZ
11722) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
1173 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
f3d6f4ee 1174
9dc15871
EZ
11753) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1176 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
9f83d8b3 1177
9dc15871
EZ
11784) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1179 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1180 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1181 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1182 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
1183 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate
1184 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1185 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1186 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1187 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1188 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
9f83d8b3 1189
9dc15871 1190*** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
9f83d8b3 1191
9dc15871
EZ
1192This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1193a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1194likely to cause it.
f29d1e75 1195
9dc15871 1196We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
f29d1e75 1197
9dc15871 1198*** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
c24be289 1199
9dc15871
EZ
1200There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1201that replacing the mouse made it stop.
c24be289 1202
9dc15871 1203*** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
b35319bf 1204
9dc15871
EZ
1205On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1206works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1207bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1208the Files menu).
b35319bf 1209
9dc15871
EZ
1210This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1211due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1212knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1213workaround can be found.
b35319bf 1214
9dc15871
EZ
1215*** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1216parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
b35319bf 1217
9dc15871
EZ
1218This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1219 emacs*Cursor: black
1220(which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1221that isn't a color.)
787994b7 1222
9dc15871 1223The fix is to correct your X resources.
0a2eeca1 1224
9dc15871 1225*** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
0a2eeca1 1226
9dc15871
EZ
1227If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1228resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1229renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1230font.
0a2eeca1 1231
9dc15871
EZ
1232One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1233your font path, like this:
0a2eeca1 1234
9dc15871 1235 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
0a2eeca1 1236
9dc15871 1237*** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
0a2eeca1 1238
9dc15871 1239An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
0a2eeca1 1240
9dc15871 1241 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
0a2eeca1 1242
9dc15871
EZ
1243This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1244individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1245want, rewrite the resource.
119d3665 1246
9dc15871
EZ
1247To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1248-query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1249the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
119d3665 1250
9dc15871
EZ
1251*** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1252*** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
0de9f9a8 1253
9dc15871
EZ
1254One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1255your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1256the environment.
0de9f9a8 1257
9dc15871 1258*** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
0de9f9a8 1259
9dc15871
EZ
1260The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1261arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1262tell Emacs to compensate for this.
0de9f9a8 1263
9dc15871
EZ
1264I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1265whether this problem is present on a given system.
0de9f9a8 1266
9dc15871 1267*** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
0de9f9a8 1268
9dc15871
EZ
1269People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1270not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1271the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1272the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
a933dad1 1273
9dc15871
EZ
1274You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1275However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1276you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
a933dad1 1277
9dc15871 1278The easy way to do this is to put
a933dad1 1279
9dc15871 1280 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
a933dad1 1281
9dc15871 1282in your site-init.el file.
a933dad1 1283
9dc15871 1284* Runtime problems on character termunals
a933dad1 1285
9dc15871 1286** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
a933dad1 1287
9dc15871
EZ
1288This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1289used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1290away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1291streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1292user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1293properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1294input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1295easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
177c0ea7 1296
9dc15871 1297There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
a933dad1 1298
9dc15871
EZ
1299 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1300 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1301 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
a933dad1 1302
9dc15871
EZ
1303First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1304they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1305"no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
1306escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1307and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1308control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
a933dad1 1309
9dc15871
EZ
1310Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1311needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1312by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1313rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1314your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1315it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1316the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1317problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1318to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
de121241 1319
9dc15871
EZ
1320For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1321giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1322codes. You might as well try it.
de121241 1323
9dc15871
EZ
1324If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1325through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1326computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1327much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1328control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1329you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1330replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1331measures can make Emacs semi-work.
de121241 1332
9dc15871
EZ
1333You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1334handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1335enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1336now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1337enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1338control handling.)
a933dad1 1339
9dc15871
EZ
1340If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1341is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1342other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1343and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1344other control characters are already used by emacs.
a933dad1 1345
9dc15871
EZ
1346IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1347Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1348order to continue.
177c0ea7 1349
9dc15871
EZ
1350If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1351certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1352`enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1353automatically. Here is an example:
a933dad1 1354
9dc15871 1355(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
a933dad1 1356
9dc15871
EZ
1357If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1358and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1359manually.
a933dad1 1360
9dc15871
EZ
1361I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1362assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1363control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1364merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1365widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1366use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1367will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1368of inferior systems.
a933dad1 1369
9dc15871 1370** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
a933dad1 1371
9dc15871
EZ
1372For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1373control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1374terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1375that wants to use flow control.
a933dad1 1376
9dc15871
EZ
1377You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1378If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1379flow control, as described in the preceding section.
a933dad1 1380
9dc15871
EZ
1381If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1382into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1383shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
a933dad1 1384
9dc15871 1385** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
a933dad1 1386
9dc15871
EZ
1387This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1388terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1389the combination of features specified for that terminal.
a933dad1 1390
9dc15871
EZ
1391The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1392Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1393(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1394terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1395what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1396and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1397There are several possibilities:
a933dad1 1398
9dc15871 13991) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
a933dad1 1400
9dc15871
EZ
1401In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1402need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
a933dad1 1403
9dc15871
EZ
14042) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1405 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1406 by termcap.
a933dad1 1407
9dc15871
EZ
1408This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1409Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1410and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1411classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1412Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1413tested on many kinds of terminals.
a933dad1 1414
9dc15871 14153) The termcap entry is wrong.
a933dad1 1416
9dc15871
EZ
1417See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1418that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1419for certain terminals.
a933dad1 1420
9dc15871
EZ
14214) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1422 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
a933dad1 1423
9dc15871
EZ
1424This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1425in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
a933dad1 1426
9dc15871 1427** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
a933dad1 1428
9dc15871
EZ
1429Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1430control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1431On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1432control on the local system.
a933dad1 1433
9dc15871
EZ
1434One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1435(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1436stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1437"stty start u stop u" will do this.
a933dad1 1438
9dc15871
EZ
1439Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1440around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1441issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
a933dad1 1442
9dc15871
EZ
1443If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1444M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1445if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1446following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
a933dad1 1447
9dc15871 1448(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
a933dad1 1449
9dc15871
EZ
1450See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1451info.
a933dad1 1452
9dc15871 1453** Output from Control-V is slow.
a933dad1 1454
9dc15871
EZ
1455On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1456Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1457to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1458before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1459the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1460it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
a933dad1 1461
9dc15871
EZ
1462If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1463that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1464specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1465concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1466send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1467fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1468time as the operations really take.
a933dad1 1469
9dc15871
EZ
1470Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1471at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1472terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1473operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1474flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1475an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1476Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1477cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1478not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1479is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
a933dad1 1480
9dc15871
EZ
1481Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1482multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1483termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1484fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1485each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1486to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1487`cm' string.
a933dad1 1488
9dc15871
EZ
1489You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1490has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1491take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
a933dad1 1492
9dc15871
EZ
1493A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1494of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
a933dad1 1495
9dc15871 1496** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
a933dad1 1497
9dc15871
EZ
1498Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1499after a day or two.
d238f982 1500
9dc15871
EZ
1501The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1502the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1503character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1504of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1505overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1506to it.
d238f982 1507
9dc15871
EZ
1508For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1509and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1510other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1511but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1512that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1513important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
d7185f9d 1514
9dc15871
EZ
1515If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1516you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1517 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1518You can probably access help-command via f1.
d7185f9d 1519
9dc15871 1520** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
a933dad1 1521
9dc15871
EZ
1522Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1523emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1524entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1525"Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1526supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1527Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1528uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1529"colors".
a933dad1 1530
9dc15871
EZ
1531In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1532``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1533back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1534use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1535doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1536sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1537it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1538capability).
a933dad1 1539
9dc15871
EZ
1540Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1541attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1542incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1543this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
a933dad1 1544
9dc15871
EZ
1545Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1546of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1547entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1548`xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1549emulator.
a933dad1 1550
9dc15871
EZ
1551Beginning with version 21.4, Emacs supports the --color command-line
1552option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1553modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1554for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
a933dad1 1555
9dc15871
EZ
1556Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1557Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1558Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1559recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1560global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1561`global-font-lock-mode'.
a933dad1 1562
9dc15871 1563* Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
a933dad1 1564
9dc15871 1565** GNU/Linux
a933dad1 1566
9dc15871
EZ
1567*** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
15685.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
a933dad1 1569
9dc15871
EZ
1570This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1571One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1572known to work.
a933dad1 1573
9dc15871
EZ
1574*** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1575the Meta key stops working.
a933dad1 1576
9dc15871
EZ
1577This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1578Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1579modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1580keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1581modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1582was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1583Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
a933dad1 1584
9dc15871
EZ
1585The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1586modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1587and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1588which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1589the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1590modifier:
a933dad1 1591
9dc15871 1592 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
17a37d87 1593
9dc15871
EZ
1594A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1595is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
17a37d87 1596
9dc15871 1597 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
17a37d87 1598
9dc15871
EZ
1599This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1600keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1601keys can serve as Meta.
17a37d87 1602
9dc15871
EZ
1603The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1604keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
a933dad1 1605
9dc15871 1606*** GNU/Linux: low startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
a933dad1 1607
9dc15871
EZ
1608People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1609startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
a933dad1 1610
9dc15871
EZ
1611This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1612Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1613improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1614networked and non-networked machines.
a933dad1 1615
9dc15871 1616Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
a933dad1 1617
9dc15871 1618**** Networked Case.
a933dad1 1619
9dc15871
EZ
1620First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1621exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1622(replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
a933dad1 1623
9dc15871 1624 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
a933dad1 1625
9dc15871
EZ
1626Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1627lines:
a933dad1 1628
9dc15871
EZ
1629 order hosts, bind
1630 multi on
a933dad1 1631
9dc15871
EZ
1632Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1633indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1634database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1635dynamically allocate ip addresses).
a933dad1 1636
9dc15871 1637**** Non-Networked Case.
a933dad1 1638
9dc15871
EZ
1639The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1640However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1641simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1642`touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1643file is not necessary with this approach.
3d00585e 1644
9dc15871 1645*** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
3d00585e 1646
9dc15871
EZ
1647This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1648ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1649These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1650the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1651(show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1652blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1653cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1654always blinks.
3d00585e 1655
9dc15871
EZ
1656A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1657enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1658the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1659cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1660the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1661cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
3d00585e 1662
9dc15871
EZ
1663To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1664`linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1665the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1666produce a modified terminfo entry.
3d00585e 1667
9dc15871
EZ
1668Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1669change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
a933dad1 1670
9dc15871 1671*** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
7838ea1b 1672
9dc15871
EZ
1673There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1674caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1675problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1676is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
a933dad1 1677
9dc15871 1678Using the old library version is a workaround.
a933dad1 1679
9dc15871 1680** Mac OS X
a933dad1 1681
9dc15871 1682*** Mac OS X (Carbon): Environment Variables from dotfiles are ignored.
a933dad1 1683
9dc15871
EZ
1684When starting Emacs from the Dock or the Finder on Mac OS X, the
1685environment variables that are set up in dotfiles, such as .cshrc or
1686.profile, are ignored. This is because the Finder and Dock are not
1687started from a shell, but instead from the Window Manager itself.
a933dad1 1688
9dc15871
EZ
1689The workaround for this is to create a .MacOSX/environment.plist file to
1690setup these environment variables. These environment variables will
1691apply to all processes regardless of where they are started.
1692For me information, see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html.
b5cb4652 1693
9dc15871 1694*** Mac OS X (Carbon): Process output truncated when using ptys.
b5cb4652 1695
9dc15871
EZ
1696There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
1697Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
1698leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
a933dad1 1699
9dc15871 1700** FreeBSD
a933dad1 1701
9dc15871
EZ
1702*** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1703directories that have the +t bit.
a933dad1 1704
9dc15871
EZ
1705This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1706Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1707with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1708link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
a933dad1 1709
9dc15871
EZ
1710If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1711file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
a933dad1 1712
9dc15871 1713*** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
a933dad1 1714
9dc15871
EZ
1715By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1716FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1717current keymap to a file with the command
a933dad1 1718
9dc15871 1719 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
a933dad1 1720
9dc15871
EZ
1721Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1722definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1723key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1724to look like this
3156909f 1725
9dc15871 1726 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
a933dad1 1727
9dc15871 1728to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
a933dad1 1729
9dc15871 1730 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
a933dad1 1731
9dc15871 1732** HP-UX
e96c5c69 1733
9dc15871 1734*** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
e96c5c69 1735
9dc15871 1736christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
a933dad1 1737
9dc15871
EZ
1738The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1739execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1740tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1741but tty is giving it back 3.
a933dad1 1742
9dc15871
EZ
1743The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1744word:
a933dad1 1745
9dc15871 1746if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
a933dad1 1747
9dc15871 1748should be changed to:
a933dad1 1749
9dc15871 1750if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
a933dad1 1751
9dc15871
EZ
1752Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1753and into .login.
a933dad1 1754
9dc15871 1755*** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
a933dad1 1756
9dc15871
EZ
1757On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1758file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1759does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1760value is just ten seconds.
a933dad1 1761
9dc15871 1762If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
a933dad1 1763
9dc15871
EZ
1764*** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1765other non-English HP keyboards too).
a933dad1 1766
9dc15871
EZ
1767This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1768shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1769configures the X server.
a933dad1 1770
9dc15871
EZ
1771 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1772 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1773 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1774 EOF
a933dad1 1775
9dc15871
EZ
1776 xmodmap - << EOF
1777 clear mod1
1778 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1779 add mod1 = Meta_L
1780 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1781 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1782 EOF
a933dad1 1783
9dc15871
EZ
1784*** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1785Emacs built with Motif.
a933dad1 1786
9dc15871
EZ
1787This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1788such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
a933dad1 1789
9dc15871 1790*** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
a933dad1 1791
9dc15871
EZ
1792To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1793rights, containing this text:
4c635a29 1794
9dc15871
EZ
1795--------------------------------
1796xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1797keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1798keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1799EOF
a933dad1 1800
9dc15871
EZ
1801xmodmap - << EOF
1802clear mod1
1803keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1804add mod1 = Meta_L
1805keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1806add mod2 = Mode_switch
1807EOF
1808--------------------------------
a933dad1 1809
9dc15871 1810*** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
a933dad1 1811
9dc15871 1812This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
a933dad1 1813
9dc15871 1814** AIX
a933dad1 1815
9dc15871 1816*** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
a933dad1 1817
9dc15871
EZ
1818People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
1819Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
a933dad1 1820
9dc15871 1821*** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
a933dad1 1822
9dc15871 1823The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
a933dad1 1824
9dc15871
EZ
1825 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
1826 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
a933dad1 1827
9dc15871 1828This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
a933dad1 1829
9dc15871
EZ
1830*** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
1831are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
1832so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
1833Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
a933dad1 1834
9dc15871 1835*** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
a933dad1 1836
9dc15871
EZ
1837This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
1838the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
1839redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
1840is to use the default compiler `cc'.
a933dad1 1841
9dc15871
EZ
1842*** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1843with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
a933dad1 1844
9dc15871
EZ
1845On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1846`unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1847Definitions" to make them defined.
a933dad1 1848
9dc15871 1849** Solaris
a933dad1 1850
9dc15871
EZ
1851We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
1852section on legacy systems.
a933dad1 1853
9dc15871 1854*** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
a933dad1 1855
9dc15871
EZ
1856This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
1857C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
a933dad1 1858
9dc15871 1859*** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
a933dad1 1860
9dc15871
EZ
1861On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
1862may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
1863is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
1864As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
a933dad1 1865
0a4dd4e4 1866*** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
a933dad1 1867
0a4dd4e4
EZ
1868We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
1869Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1870makes the problem stop:
a933dad1 1871
0a4dd4e4
EZ
1872105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1873105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1874106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1875105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
a933dad1 1876
0a4dd4e4
EZ
1877Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1878suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
a933dad1 1879
0a4dd4e4
EZ
1880106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1881106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1882105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
a933dad1 1883
0a4dd4e4 1884*** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
a933dad1 1885
0a4dd4e4
EZ
1886This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
1887Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
a933dad1 1888
9dc15871
EZ
1889*** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1890commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
a933dad1 1891
9dc15871 1892You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
a933dad1 1893
9dc15871 1894 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
a933dad1 1895
0a4dd4e4
EZ
1896*** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
1897the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
a933dad1 1898
0a4dd4e4 1899You can fix this by editing the file:
a933dad1 1900
0a4dd4e4 1901 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
a01325b8 1902
0a4dd4e4 1903Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
a933dad1 1904
0a4dd4e4 1905 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
a933dad1 1906
0a4dd4e4 1907that should read:
a933dad1 1908
0a4dd4e4 1909 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
a933dad1 1910
0a4dd4e4 1911Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
a933dad1 1912
0a4dd4e4 1913** Irix
a933dad1 1914
9dc15871 1915*** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
a933dad1 1916
9dc15871 1917This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
a933dad1 1918
0a4dd4e4 1919*** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
a933dad1 1920
9dc15871
EZ
1921The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
1922be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
1923to allocate ptys reliably.
a933dad1 1924
9dc15871 1925* Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
a933dad1 1926
9dc15871 1927** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
a933dad1 1928
9dc15871
EZ
1929A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
1930Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
1931problem.
a933dad1 1932
9dc15871 1933** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.2.
a933dad1 1934
9dc15871
EZ
1935Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
1936is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
1937displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
1938synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
1939waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
1940pop-up menu interaction.
a933dad1 1941
9dc15871
EZ
1942Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
1943for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
a933dad1 1944
9dc15871
EZ
1945There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
1946mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
1947frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
1948after moving back into it.
a933dad1 1949
9dc15871
EZ
1950Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
1951not as severely as in 21.1.
a933dad1 1952
9dc15871
EZ
1953Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
1954characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
a933dad1 1955
9dc15871
EZ
1956An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
1957Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
a933dad1 1958
9dc15871
EZ
1959Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.2). Some
1960of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
1961in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
1962characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
1963work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
1964you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
1965the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
1966ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
1967appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
1968yet.)
a933dad1 1969
9dc15871
EZ
1970The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
1971month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
1972of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
1973library function.
a933dad1 1974
0a4dd4e4 1975** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
a933dad1 1976
0a4dd4e4
EZ
1977This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1978you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
1979and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
1980more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
1981or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
a933dad1 1982
0a4dd4e4 1983** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
a933dad1 1984
0a4dd4e4
EZ
1985Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
1986MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
1987port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
1988keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
1989of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
a933dad1 1990
0a4dd4e4 1991** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
a933dad1 1992
0a4dd4e4
EZ
1993If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
1994due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
1995and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
1996port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
1997are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
1998confuses ange-ftp.
a933dad1 1999
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2000The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2001(version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2002Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2003directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2004variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2005client's executable. For example:
a933dad1 2006
9dc15871 2007 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
a933dad1 2008
9dc15871
EZ
2009If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2010this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
a933dad1 2011
9dc15871 2012 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
a933dad1 2013
9dc15871 2014** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
a933dad1 2015
9dc15871
EZ
2016This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2017likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
a933dad1 2018
9dc15871
EZ
2019Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2020print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2021printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2022built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2023has):
a933dad1 2024
9dc15871
EZ
2025(setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2026(setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2027(setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2028(setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
a933dad1 2029
9dc15871 2030** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
a933dad1 2031
9dc15871
EZ
2032The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2033work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2034was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2035work when an antivirus package is installed.
a933dad1 2036
9dc15871
EZ
2037The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2038mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2039or disable it entirely.
a933dad1 2040
9dc15871 2041** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
a933dad1 2042
9dc15871
EZ
2043This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2044programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2045mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2046different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2047middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2048"scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2049generic mouse driver might help.
a933dad1 2050
9dc15871 2051** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
a933dad1 2052
9dc15871
EZ
2053This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2054generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2055movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2056scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
a933dad1 2057
9dc15871
EZ
2058** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2059mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2060exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2061seen.
a933dad1 2062
9dc15871
EZ
2063** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2064CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
a933dad1 2065
9dc15871 2066This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
a933dad1 2067
9dc15871
EZ
2068Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2069events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2070distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2071combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2072AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2073to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
a933dad1 2074
9dc15871 2075** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
a933dad1 2076
9dc15871
EZ
2077The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2078screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2079display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2080to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
a933dad1 2081
9dc15871
EZ
2082This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2083as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2084problem lies in the X-server settings.
a933dad1 2085
9dc15871
EZ
2086There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2087running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2088un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2089selection".
a933dad1 2090
9dc15871
EZ
2091Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2092please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2093If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2094here.
a933dad1 2095
9dc15871 2096* Build-time problems
a933dad1 2097
9dc15871 2098** Configuration
a933dad1 2099
9dc15871 2100*** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
a933dad1 2101
9dc15871
EZ
2102There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2103by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2104default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
a933dad1 2105
9dc15871
EZ
2106If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2107`--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2108shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2109the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2110Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2111explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
a933dad1 2112
9dc15871 2113** Compilation
a933dad1 2114
9dc15871 2115*** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
a933dad1 2116
9dc15871
EZ
2117This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
2118(RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
2119(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2120configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2121files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2122left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2123itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2124Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
a933dad1 2125
9dc15871
EZ
2126In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2127machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2128(it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2129This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
a933dad1 2130
9dc15871
EZ
2131If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2132(Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2133you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2134force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2135problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2136blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2137`mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2138options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2139`/etc/auto.home'.
a933dad1 2140
9dc15871
EZ
2141Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2142a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2143waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2144to work around the problem.
a933dad1 2145
9dc15871
EZ
2146Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2147onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2148you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2149`/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
a933dad1 2150
9dc15871 2151 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
a933dad1 2152
9dc15871 2153The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
a933dad1 2154
9dc15871 2155*** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
a933dad1 2156
9dc15871
EZ
2157This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2158of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2159version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2160dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2161around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2162incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2163". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2164directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2165variables).
a933dad1 2166
9dc15871
EZ
2167The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2168`-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2169when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2170unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2171run the script like this:
a933dad1 2172
9dc15871 2173 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
a933dad1 2174
9dc15871
EZ
2175(replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2176the script).
a933dad1 2177
9dc15871
EZ
2178Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2179Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
a933dad1 2180
9dc15871
EZ
2181*** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2182*** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
a933dad1 2183
9dc15871
EZ
2184This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2185had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2186problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2187configure script.
a933dad1 2188
9dc15871 2189*** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
a933dad1 2190
9dc15871
EZ
2191This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2192the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2193Emacs's configure script.
a933dad1 2194
9dc15871 2195*** Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
a933dad1 2196
9dc15871
EZ
2197Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2198version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2199necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2200__MSVCRT__, like so:
a933dad1 2201
9dc15871 2202 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
a933dad1 2203
9dc15871 2204*** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
a933dad1 2205
9dc15871
EZ
2206Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2207to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2208fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
a933dad1 2209
9dc15871 2210*** Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
a933dad1 2211
9dc15871 2212The error message might be something like this:
a933dad1 2213
9dc15871
EZ
2214 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
2215 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
2216 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
2217 '0xffffffff'
2218 Stop.
a933dad1 2219
9dc15871
EZ
2220This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
2221which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
2222`*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
2223endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
2224or EOL conversions.
a933dad1 2225
9dc15871
EZ
2226The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
2227change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
2228in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
2229which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
2230mangling them.
a933dad1 2231
9dc15871 2232*** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
a933dad1 2233
9dc15871
EZ
2234This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2235defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2236patch to assert.h should solve this:
a933dad1 2237
9dc15871
EZ
2238*** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2239--- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2240***************
2241*** 41,47 ****
2242 /*
2243 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2244 */
2245! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
a933dad1 2246
9dc15871 2247 #else /* debugging enabled */
a933dad1 2248
9dc15871
EZ
2249--- 41,47 ----
2250 /*
2251 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2252 */
2253! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
a933dad1 2254
9dc15871 2255 #else /* debugging enabled */
a933dad1 2256
a933dad1 2257
9dc15871 2258** Linking
a933dad1 2259
9dc15871
EZ
2260*** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2261undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
a933dad1 2262
9dc15871
EZ
2263This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2264with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2265GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2266from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2267compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2268link stage.
a933dad1 2269
9dc15871 2270A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
a933dad1 2271
9dc15871 2272 make CC=gcc
a933dad1 2273
9dc15871
EZ
2274Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2275with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
a933dad1 2276
9dc15871 2277*** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
a933dad1 2278
9dc15871
EZ
2279There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2280the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2281workaround/fix is:
a933dad1 2282
9dc15871
EZ
2283 cd /lib
2284 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2285 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
a933dad1 2286
9dc15871
EZ
2287*** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2288 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2289 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
a933dad1 2290
9dc15871
EZ
2291This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2292these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2293you build Emacs:
a933dad1 2294
9dc15871
EZ
2295 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2296 chmod 664 libIM.a
2297 ranlib libIM.a
a933dad1 2298
9dc15871
EZ
2299Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2300Makefile).
a933dad1 2301
9dc15871 2302*** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
a933dad1 2303
9dc15871 2304To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
a933dad1 2305
9dc15871 2306 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
a933dad1 2307
9dc15871 2308and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
a933dad1 2309
9dc15871
EZ
2310The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2311cannot easily arrange to supply them.
a933dad1 2312
9dc15871 2313*** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
a933dad1 2314
9dc15871 2315Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
a933dad1 2316
9dc15871 2317*** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
a933dad1 2318
9dc15871
EZ
2319This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2320version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2321definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2322incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2323does not work with this version of ncurses.
a933dad1 2324
9dc15871 2325The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
a933dad1 2326
9dc15871 2327** Dumping
a933dad1 2328
9dc15871 2329*** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
a933dad1 2330
9dc15871
EZ
2331With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Redhat Fedora Core
23321), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
2333creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper.
a933dad1 2334
9dc15871 2335You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
a933dad1 2336
9dc15871 2337 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
a933dad1 2338
9dc15871
EZ
2339It returns 1 or 2 when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
2340read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
2341associated commands.
a933dad1 2342
9dc15871
EZ
2343When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2344execution of this command:
a933dad1 2345
9dc15871 2346temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
177c0ea7 2347
9dc15871
EZ
2348To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
2349Exec-shield while building Emacs, using the `setarch' command like
2350this:
a933dad1 2351
9dc15871
EZ
2352 setarch i386 ./configure <configure parameters>
2353 setarch i386 make <make parameters>
a933dad1 2354
9dc15871 2355*** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
a933dad1 2356
9dc15871
EZ
2357This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2358Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
a933dad1 2359
9dc15871
EZ
2360It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2361space available on the machine.
a933dad1 2362
9dc15871
EZ
2363On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2364subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2365for large blocks (many pages).
a933dad1 2366
9dc15871
EZ
2367*** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2368*** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2369*** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2370*** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
a933dad1 2371
9dc15871
EZ
2372This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2373fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2374binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
a933dad1 2375
9dc15871
EZ
2376In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2377It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2378a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2379itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2380when unpacking the shell archive.
a933dad1 2381
9dc15871
EZ
2382I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2383what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2384file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
a933dad1 2385
9dc15871
EZ
2386If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2387nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
a933dad1 2388
9dc15871
EZ
2389 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2390 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2391 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2392 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2393 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2394 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2395 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2396 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2397 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2398 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2399 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2400 and remake temacs.
2401 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
a933dad1 2402
9dc15871 2403*** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
a933dad1 2404
9dc15871
EZ
2405This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2406files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2407space than was allocated.
a933dad1 2408
9dc15871
EZ
2409This could be caused by
2410 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2411 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2412 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2413 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2414 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2415 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2416 deleting that file.
2417 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2418 (not from the directory you expected).
2419 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2420 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2421 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2422 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2423 the space required.
a933dad1 2424
9dc15871
EZ
2425If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2426of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
a933dad1 2427
9dc15871
EZ
2428But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2429of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2430problem.
a933dad1 2431
9dc15871 2432*** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
a933dad1 2433
9dc15871
EZ
2434The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2435C backtrace printed by GDB:
a933dad1 2436
9dc15871
EZ
2437 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2438 (gdb) where
2439 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2440 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2441 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2442 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
a933dad1 2443
9dc15871
EZ
2444This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2445of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2446but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2447other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2448distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2449GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2450following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2451distribution:
a933dad1 2452
9dc15871
EZ
2453 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2454 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2455 know what's really going on here. */
2456 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2457 0x10000000. */
2458 #if defined __linux__
2459 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2460 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2461 #endif
2462 #endif
2463 #endif /* 0 */
a933dad1 2464
9dc15871
EZ
2465Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2466the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2467should now succeed.
a933dad1 2468
9dc15871 2469** Installation
a933dad1 2470
9dc15871 2471*** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
a933dad1 2472
9dc15871
EZ
2473You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2474supplies the `install-info' command.
a933dad1 2475
9dc15871 2476** First execution
a933dad1 2477
9dc15871 2478*** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
a933dad1 2479
9dc15871
EZ
2480This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2481via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2482Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2483binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
a933dad1 2484
9dc15871 2485 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
a933dad1 2486
9dc15871
EZ
2487We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2488build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
a933dad1 2489
9dc15871 2490*** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
a933dad1 2491
9dc15871 2492Two causes have been seen for such problems.
a933dad1 2493
9dc15871
EZ
24941) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2495as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2496it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2497value in the man page for a.out (5).
a933dad1 2498
9dc15871
EZ
24992) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2500initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2501of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2502not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2503may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
a933dad1 2504
9dc15871 2505* Emacs 19 problems
a933dad1 2506
9dc15871 2507** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
a933dad1 2508
9dc15871
EZ
2509This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2510Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2511Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2512where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
a933dad1 2513
9dc15871 2514So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
a933dad1 2515
9dc15871 2516* Runtime problems on legacy systems
a933dad1 2517
9dc15871
EZ
2518This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2519If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2520it is unlikely you will see any of these.
a933dad1 2521
9dc15871 2522** Ancient operating systems
a933dad1 2523
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2524AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2525
2526*** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2527
2528 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2529 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2530
2531This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2532libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2533X11Dev... with smit.
2534
2535(This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2536
2537*** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2538
2539Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2540ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2541lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2542treated as control characters.
2543
2544You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2545releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2546
2547*** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2548
2549 Could not load program emacs
2550 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2551 Error was: Exec format error
2552
2553or this one:
2554
2555 Could not load program .emacs
2556 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2557 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2558 Error was: Exec format error
2559
2560These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2561compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2562
2563*** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
2564
2565If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
2566without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
2567
9dc15871 2568*** ISC Unix
a933dad1 2569
9dc15871 2570**** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
a933dad1 2571
9dc15871
EZ
2572Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2573versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2574cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2575This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2576processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
a933dad1 2577
9dc15871
EZ
2578Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2579the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
a933dad1 2580
9dc15871 2581The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
a933dad1 2582
9dc15871 2583*** SunOS
a933dad1 2584
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2585SunOS 4.1.4 stopped shipping on Sep 30 1998.
2586
2587**** SunOS: You get linker errors
2588 ld: Undefined symbol
2589 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
2590 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
2591
9dc15871 2592**** Sun 4.0.x: M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
a933dad1 2593
9dc15871
EZ
2594This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2595version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
a933dad1 2596
9dc15871 2597**** SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3: Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
a933dad1
DL
2598
2599Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2600sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2601delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2602program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2603means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2604command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2605obtain the destination address.
2606
2607There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2608In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2609non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
26102.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
26114.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2612have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2613of this writing, these official versions are available:
2614
2615 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2616 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2617 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2618 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2619 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2620
2621 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2622 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2623
9dc15871 2624**** Sunos 4: You get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
a933dad1 2625
9dc15871
EZ
2626This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2627for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2628/usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
a933dad1 2629
9dc15871 2630**** SunOS 4.1.3: Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
a933dad1 2631
9dc15871
EZ
2632This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
2633on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
2634version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
2635it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
a933dad1 2636
9dc15871 2637**** Sunos 4.1.3: Emacs gets hung shortly after startup.
a933dad1 2638
9dc15871
EZ
2639We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2640one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
a933dad1 2641
9dc15871
EZ
2642100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2643100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2644100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2645100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2646100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
a933dad1 2647
9dc15871
EZ
2648We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2649which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
a933dad1 2650
9dc15871
EZ
2651**** SunOS 4: Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
2652(or log out, if you logged in using X).
a933dad1 2653
9dc15871 2654Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
a933dad1 2655
9dc15871
EZ
2656The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
2657or link libXmu statically.
a933dad1 2658
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2659**** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
2660
2661A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2662exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2663applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2664communicating through pipes.
2665
9dc15871 2666*** Apollo Domain
a933dad1 2667
9dc15871 2668**** Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain.
a933dad1 2669
9dc15871 2670You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
a933dad1 2671
9dc15871 2672 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
a933dad1 2673
9dc15871
EZ
2674This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2675Here is how to make more of them.
a933dad1 2676
9dc15871
EZ
2677 % cd /dev
2678 % ls pty*
2679 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2680 % /etc/crpty 8
2681 # creates eight new pty's
a933dad1 2682
9dc15871 2683*** Irix
a933dad1 2684
9dc15871 2685*** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
a933dad1 2686
9dc15871
EZ
2687This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
2688as of 8 Dec 1998.
a933dad1 2689
9dc15871 2690The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
a933dad1 2691
9dc15871
EZ
2692*** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
2693in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
a933dad1 2694
9dc15871 2695 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
a933dad1 2696
9dc15871
EZ
2697This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
2698003082 August 11, 1998.
a933dad1 2699
9dc15871 2700*** OPENSTEP
a933dad1 2701
9dc15871 2702**** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
a933dad1 2703
9dc15871
EZ
2704The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
2705following message:
a933dad1 2706
9dc15871 2707 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
a933dad1 2708
9dc15871
EZ
2709To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
2710INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
2711functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
a933dad1 2712
9dc15871
EZ
2713 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
2714 {
2715 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
2716 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
a933dad1 2717
9dc15871
EZ
2718Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
2719with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
a933dad1 2720
9dc15871 2721*** Solaris 2.x
a933dad1 2722
9dc15871 2723**** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
a933dad1 2724
9dc15871
EZ
2725Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
2726editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
2727as GCC.
a933dad1 2728
9dc15871 2729**** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
a933dad1 2730
9dc15871
EZ
2731If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
2732of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
2733called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
a933dad1 2734
9dc15871 2735**** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
a933dad1 2736
9dc15871
EZ
2737This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
2738version of Solaris that you are using.
a933dad1 2739
9dc15871 2740**** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
a933dad1 2741
9dc15871
EZ
2742A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
2743the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
a933dad1 2744
9dc15871 2745We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
a933dad1 2746
9dc15871 2747**** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
a933dad1 2748
9dc15871
EZ
2749Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
2750102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
2751Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
2752by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
2753However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
a933dad1 2754
9dc15871
EZ
2755Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
2756you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
2757We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
2758for certain.
a933dad1 2759
9dc15871
EZ
2760 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
2761 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
2762 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
a933dad1 2763
9dc15871
EZ
2764(One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
2765with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
a933dad1 2766
9dc15871
EZ
2767If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
2768bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
a933dad1 2769
9dc15871
EZ
2770Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
2771Solaris 2.5.
a933dad1 2772
9dc15871
EZ
2773**** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
2774forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
a933dad1 2775
9dc15871
EZ
2776casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
2777after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
a933dad1 2778
9dc15871
EZ
2779 #if ThreadedX
2780 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2781 #endif
a933dad1 2782
9dc15871 2783to:
a933dad1 2784
9dc15871
EZ
2785 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
2786 #if ThreadedX
2787 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2788 #endif
2789 #endif
2790
2791Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
2792(as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
2793OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
2794Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
2795definition for your type of machine and system.
a933dad1 2796
9dc15871
EZ
2797Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
2798the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
2799Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
a933dad1 2800
9dc15871
EZ
2801For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
2802101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
2803to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
2804patch.
a933dad1 2805
9dc15871
EZ
2806However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
2807he changed
2808 #define ThreadedX YES
2809to
2810 #define ThreadedX NO
2811in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
2812`-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
2813typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
a933dad1 2814
9dc15871 2815**** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
a933dad1 2816
9dc15871
EZ
2817This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2818are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2819does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2820later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2821described in the Solaris FAQ
2822<http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2823to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
a933dad1 2824
9dc15871
EZ
2825**** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
2826C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
2827compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
2828release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
2829another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
2830and the default CFLAGS.
a933dad1 2831
9dc15871 2832**** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
a933dad1 2833
9dc15871
EZ
2834The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
2835Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
2836(Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
2837You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
2838You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
2839look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
2840are currently recommended for your host.
a933dad1 2841
9dc15871
EZ
2842On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
2843105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
2844105284-18 might fix it again.
a933dad1 2845
0a4dd4e4 2846**** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
a933dad1 2847
9dc15871
EZ
2848This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
2849the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
2850support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
2851If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
a933dad1 2852
9dc15871
EZ
2853One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
2854For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
2855variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
2856lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
2857should do.
a933dad1 2858
9dc15871
EZ
2859pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
2860if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
2861libraries.
a933dad1 2862
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2863*** HP/UX versions before 11.0
2864
2865HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
2866HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
2867
2868**** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
2869
2870We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
2871the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
2872does not happen.
2873
2874*** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
2875
2876See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
2877
2878*** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
2879
2880This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2881doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2882because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2883libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2884those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2885install them and rebuild Emacs.
2886
9dc15871 2887*** Ultrix and Digital Unix
a933dad1 2888
9dc15871 2889**** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
a933dad1 2890
9dc15871
EZ
2891This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2892commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2893Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2894hand.
a933dad1 2895
9dc15871 2896**** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
a933dad1 2897
9dc15871
EZ
2898So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
2899is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
2900properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
2901`tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
2902in Emacs.
a933dad1 2903
9dc15871 2904**** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
a933dad1 2905
9dc15871
EZ
2906On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2907in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2908expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2909in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
a933dad1 2910
9dc15871
EZ
2911The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2912anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
a933dad1 2913
9dc15871
EZ
2914I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2915going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2916Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2917in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
a933dad1 2918
9dc15871 2919*** SVr4
a933dad1 2920
9dc15871 2921**** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
a933dad1 2922
9dc15871
EZ
2923Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2924the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2925sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
a933dad1 2926
9dc15871 2927**** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
a933dad1 2928
9dc15871
EZ
2929Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2930mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2931the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
a933dad1 2932
9dc15871
EZ
2933Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2934you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2935operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2936configure script) that reads:
2937#define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2938This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2939the kernel bug.
a933dad1 2940
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2941*** Irix 5 and earlier
2942
2943Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
2944shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
2945
2946**** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
2947
2948The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
2949Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
2950compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
2951workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
2952syms.h.
2953
2954**** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
2955
2956This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
2957many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
2958swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
2959can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
2960command `swap -l'.
2961
2962You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
2963line like this:
2964
2965/usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
2966
2967where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
2968by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
2969that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
2970new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
2971information.
2972
2973The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
2974swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
2975on the network that can log on to the host.
2976
2977If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
2978the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
2979some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
2980icons.
2981
2982You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
2983FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
2984("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
2985ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
2986
2987**** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
2988
2989This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
2990It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
2991
2992**** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
2993
2994A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
2995in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
2996find that string, and take out the spaces.
2997
2998Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
2999
3000*** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3001
3002**** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3003
3004The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3005that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3006fonts, so it does not work.
3007
3008This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3009the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3010emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3011that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3012resources affect Emacs also:
3013
3014 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3015 *Background: scoBackground
3016 *Foreground: scoForeground
3017
3018The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3019Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3020
3021 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3022 Emacs*Background: white
3023 Emacs*Foreground: black
3024
3025(These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3026suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3027starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3028environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3029as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3030/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3031but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3032Open Desktop display.
3033
3034These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3035machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3036
3037**** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3038
3039On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3040with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3041version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3042C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3043GCC.
3044
3045**** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3046
3047Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3048virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3049the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3050error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3051exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3052memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3053
3054You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3055But you have to be root to do it.
3056
3057According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3058
3059 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3060 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3061 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3062 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3063 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3064
3065(He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3066These changes take effect when you reboot.
3067
9dc15871 3068*** Linux 1.x
a933dad1 3069
9dc15871 3070**** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
a933dad1 3071
9dc15871
EZ
3072This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3073to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3074Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
a933dad1 3075
9dc15871
EZ
3076**** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3077truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
a933dad1 3078
9dc15871
EZ
3079This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
30801.3.75.
a933dad1 3081
0a4dd4e4
EZ
3082** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3083
3084*** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3085
3086`perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3087The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3088
3089The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3090"CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3091with the user.
3092
3093On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3094pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3095communicate with the subprocess.
3096
3097On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3098relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3099redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3100stdin.
3101
3102A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3103
3104For Perl 4:
3105
3106 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3107 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3108 ***************
3109 *** 68,74 ****
3110 $rcfile=".perldb";
3111 }
3112 else {
3113 ! $console = "con";
3114 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3115 }
3116
3117 --- 68,74 ----
3118 $rcfile=".perldb";
3119 }
3120 else {
3121 ! $console = "";
3122 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3123 }
3124
3125
3126 For Perl 5:
3127 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3128 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3129 ***************
3130 *** 22,28 ****
3131 $rcfile=".perldb";
3132 }
3133 elsif (-e "con") {
3134 ! $console = "con";
3135 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3136 }
3137 else {
3138 --- 22,28 ----
3139 $rcfile=".perldb";
3140 }
3141 elsif (-e "con") {
3142 ! $console = "";
3143 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3144 }
3145 else {
3146
3147*** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3148
3149This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3150You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3151
3152*** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3153
3154This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3155when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3156cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3157http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3158
3159*** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3160
3161When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3162Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3163particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3164program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3165PATH.
3166
9dc15871 3167** MS-DOS
a933dad1 3168
9dc15871 3169*** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
a933dad1 3170
9dc15871
EZ
3171If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3172Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3173program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3174config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3175the front of your PATH environment variable.
a933dad1 3176
9dc15871
EZ
3177*** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3178like make-docfile.
a933dad1 3179
9dc15871
EZ
3180This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3181variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3182compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
3183the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
a933dad1 3184
9dc15871 3185*** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
a933dad1 3186
9dc15871 3187 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
a933dad1 3188
9dc15871
EZ
3189This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3190on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3191value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3192works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3193support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3194undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3195[emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3196`TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3197your system works as before.
a933dad1 3198
9dc15871 3199*** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
a933dad1 3200
9dc15871
EZ
3201Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3202and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3203know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3204memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3205However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
a933dad1 3206
9dc15871
EZ
3207You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3208arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3209information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3210is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
a933dad1 3211
9dc15871
EZ
3212Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3213configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3214removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3215and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3216the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
a933dad1 3217
9dc15871
EZ
3218*** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3219in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3220drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
a933dad1 3221
9dc15871
EZ
3222This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3223device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3224work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
a933dad1 3225
9dc15871 3226*** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
a933dad1 3227
9dc15871 3228There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
a933dad1 3229
9dc15871
EZ
3230 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3231 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3232 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
a933dad1 3233
9dc15871
EZ
3234To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3235subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3236them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3237incorrect library functions.
a933dad1 3238
9dc15871
EZ
3239*** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3240run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
a933dad1 3241
9dc15871
EZ
3242Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3243immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3244the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3245and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
a933dad1 3246
9dc15871
EZ
3247Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3248the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3249Lisp.
a933dad1 3250
9dc15871
EZ
3251This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3252support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3253characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3254You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3255filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3256compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
3257explains this issue in more detail.
a933dad1 3258
9dc15871
EZ
3259Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3260MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3261by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3262unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3263them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3264must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3265properly truncated.
a933dad1 3266
9dc15871 3267** Archaic window managers and toolkits
a933dad1 3268
9dc15871 3269*** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
a933dad1 3270
9dc15871
EZ
3271Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3272command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3273Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3274manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3275shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
a933dad1 3276
9dc15871 3277 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
a933dad1 3278
9dc15871 3279**** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
a933dad1 3280
9dc15871
EZ
3281twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3282You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
a933dad1 3283
9dc15871 3284 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
a933dad1 3285
9dc15871 3286** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
a933dad1 3287
9dc15871 3288*** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
a933dad1 3289
9dc15871 3290This shell command should fix it:
a933dad1 3291
9dc15871 3292 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
a933dad1 3293
9dc15871
EZ
3294*** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3295as a concentrator.
a933dad1 3296
9dc15871
EZ
3297This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
32987 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
a933dad1 3299
9dc15871 3300* Build problems on legacy systems
a933dad1 3301
9dc15871 3302** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
a933dad1 3303
9dc15871
EZ
3304This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3305The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3306such as bash.
a933dad1 3307
9dc15871
EZ
3308** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3309 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
a933dad1 3310
9dc15871
EZ
3311This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3312Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
a933dad1 3313
9dc15871 3314** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
a933dad1 3315
9dc15871 3316This problem manifests itself as an error message
a933dad1 3317
9dc15871 3318 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
a933dad1 3319
9dc15871
EZ
3320The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3321were built for an older system version,
a933dad1 3322
9dc15871 3323 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
a933dad1 3324
9dc15871 3325made the problem go away.
a933dad1 3326
9dc15871 3327** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
a933dad1 3328
9dc15871 3329If you get errors such as
a933dad1 3330
9dc15871
EZ
3331 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3332 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3333 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
a933dad1 3334
9dc15871
EZ
3335This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3336to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3337script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3338make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3339ones available when you build Emacs.
a933dad1 3340
9dc15871 3341** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
a933dad1 3342
9dc15871 3343 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
a933dad1 3344
9dc15871 3345The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
a933dad1 3346
9dc15871 3347The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
a933dad1 3348
9dc15871 3349** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
a933dad1 3350
9dc15871
EZ
3351If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3352_iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3353-lXaw in the command that links temacs.
a933dad1 3354
9dc15871
EZ
3355This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3356extensions to X11R5 are installed.
a933dad1 3357
9dc15871 3358** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
a933dad1 3359
9dc15871
EZ
3360If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3361`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3362that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3363with a floating point option other than the default.
a933dad1 3364
9dc15871
EZ
3365It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3366crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3367However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3368floating point option: -fsoft.
a933dad1 3369
9dc15871 3370** SunOS: Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose.
a933dad1 3371
9dc15871
EZ
3372If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
3373with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
3374the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
3375libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
3376toolkit.)
a933dad1 3377
9dc15871
EZ
3378If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
3379lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
3380X11R4, then use it in the link.
a933dad1 3381
0a4dd4e4
EZ
3382** SunOS4, DGUX 5.4.2: --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
3383
3384On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
3385unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
3386toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
3387libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
3388unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
3389and Solaris in version 19.29.
3390
3391** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3392
3393This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3394
9dc15871 3395** VMS: Compilation errors on VMS.
a933dad1 3396
9dc15871
EZ
3397You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
3398variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
3399This is not an error. Ignore it.
a933dad1 3400
9dc15871
EZ
3401VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
3402were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
a933dad1 3403
9dc15871
EZ
3404There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
3405in conditional expressions. The bug is:
3406 char c = -1, d = 1;
3407 int i;
a933dad1 3408
9dc15871
EZ
3409 i = d ? c : d;
3410The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
3411conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
3412constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
a933dad1 3413
9dc15871 3414** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
a933dad1
DL
3415
3416You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3417
3418 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3419 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3420
3421These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3422Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3423may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3424on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3425in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3426can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3427that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3428
3429As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3430you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3431can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3432should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3433array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3434 Lisp_Object *args;
3435 ...
3436 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3437putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3438 Lisp_Object *args;
3439 Lisp_Object tem;
3440 ...
3441 tem = args[i];
3442 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3443causes the problem to go away.
3444The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3445so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3446
9dc15871 3447** 68000 C compiler problems
a933dad1
DL
3448
3449Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3450These are some that have been observed.
3451
9dc15871 3452*** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
a933dad1
DL
3453This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3454if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3455
9dc15871 3456*** "cannot reclaim" error.
a933dad1
DL
3457
3458This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3459line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3460simpler expressions.
3461
9dc15871 3462*** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
a933dad1
DL
3463
3464If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3465Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3466
3467struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3468
3469lose (arg)
3470 struct foo arg;
3471{
3472 test ((int *) arg.y);
3473}
3474
3475If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3476In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3477((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3478
3479This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3480of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3481
9dc15871 3482*** C compilers lose on returning unions.
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DL
3483
3484I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3485Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3486defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3487
3488This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3489of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3490
53854552 3491\f
9dc15871 3492Copyright 1987,88,89,93,94,95,96,97,98,1999,2001,2002,2004
fe6b4873
RS
3493 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3494
3495Copying and redistribution of this file with or without modification
3496are permitted without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
3497
53854552
EZ
3498Local variables:
3499mode: outline
3500paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3501end:
ab5796a9
MB
3502
3503arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a