(align-region): Added a missing name argument.
[bpt/emacs.git] / etc / PROBLEMS
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1This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
3
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4* Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
5
6This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
7of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
8version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
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9dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
10around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
11incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
12". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
13directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
14variables).
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15
16The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
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17`-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
18when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
19unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
20run the script like this:
21
173de997 22 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
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23
24(replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
25the script).
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26
27Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
28Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
29
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30* Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
31undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
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32
33This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
34with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
35GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
36from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
37compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
38link stage.
39
40A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
41
42 make CC=gcc
43
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44Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
45with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
46
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47* Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
48
49Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
50version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
51necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
52__MSVCRT__, like so:
53
54 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
55
56* Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
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57
58The error message might be something like this:
59
c24be289 60 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
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61 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
62 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
63 '0xffffffff'
64 Stop.
65
66This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
67which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
68`*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
69endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
70or EOL conversions.
71
72The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
73change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
74in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
75which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
76mangling them.
77
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78* Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
79
80The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
81C backtrace printed by GDB:
82
83 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
84 (gdb) where
85 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
86 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
87 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
88 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
89
90This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
91of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
92but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
93other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
94distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
95GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
96following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
97distribution:
98
cbfe0252 99 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
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100 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
101 know what's really going on here. */
102 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
103 0x10000000. */
104 #if defined __linux__
105 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
106 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
107 #endif
108 #endif
109 #endif /* 0 */
110
111Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
112the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
113should now succeed.
114
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115* JPEG images aren't displayed.
116
117This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
118Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem.
119
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120* Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
121
122This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
123defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
124patch to assert.h should solve this:
125
126*** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
127--- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
128***************
129*** 41,47 ****
130 /*
131 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
132 */
133! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
134
135 #else /* debugging enabled */
136
137--- 41,47 ----
138 /*
139 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
140 */
141! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
142
143 #else /* debugging enabled */
144
145
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146
147* Improving performance with slow X connections
148
149If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
150language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by
151configuring Emacs with option `--without-xim'. Configuring Emacs
152without XIM does not affect the use of Emacs' own input methods, which
153are part of the Leim package.
154
155If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
156switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
157
158* Getting a Meta key on the FreeBSD console
159
160By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
161FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
162current keymap to a file with the command
163
164 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
165
166Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
167definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
168key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
169to look like this
170
171 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
172
173to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
174
175 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
176
177* Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
178
179A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
180into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
181incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
182other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
183been filed.
184
185* Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font
186
187This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
1882.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
189event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
190Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
191
192A workaround for this is to add something like
193
194emacs.waitForWM: false
195
196to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
197frame's parameter list, like this:
198
199 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
200
201(this should go into your `.emacs' file).
202
203* Underlines appear at the wrong position.
204
205This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
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206Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
207neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
208problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
209`.emacs'.
210
211To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
212type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
213property.
61638355 214
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215* When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
216click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
217is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
218problem disappears.
219
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220* There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
221XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
222one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
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223For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
224"C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
225used with neXtaw at run time.
226
227The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
228want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
229built Emacs with.
ed0d1d91 230
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231* Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
232
233This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
234a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
235--without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
236
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237* Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
238
239This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
240terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
241If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
242version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
243and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
244
245All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
246problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
247terminfo when built.
248
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249* Error messages about undefined colors on X.
250
251The messages might say something like this:
252
253 Unable to load color "grey95"
254
255(typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
256
257 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
258
259These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
260many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
261resources to load all the colors it needs.
262
263A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
264
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265* Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
266
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267Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
268emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
269entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
270"Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
271supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
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272Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
273uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
274"colors".
275
276In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
277``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
278back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
279use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
280doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
281sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
282it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
283capability).
284
285Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
286attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
287incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
288this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
ed85f61d 289
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290Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
291of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
ed85f61d 292entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
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293`xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
294emulator.
ed85f61d 295
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296Beginning with version 21.3, Emacs supports the --color command-line
297option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
298modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
299for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
300
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301Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
302Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
303Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
304recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
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305global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
306`global-font-lock-mode'.
ed85f61d 307
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308* Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
309
310This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
311ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
312These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
313the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
314(show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
315blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
316cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
317always blinks.
318
319A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
320enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
321the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
322cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
323the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
324cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
325
326To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
327`linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
328the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
329produce a modified terminfo entry.
330
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331Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
332change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
333
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334* Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
335
336The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
337emulation for which it is set up.
338
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339Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
340Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
341On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
342--enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
343successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
344lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
345menu placement.
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346
347On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
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348locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
349what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
350developers.
339b95d5 351
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352* Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.1.
353
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354Emacs 21.1 built for MS-Windows doesn't support images and the tool bar.
355Support for these will be added in future versions.
b87207a0 356
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357Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
358is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menu items is not
359displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
360synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
361waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
362pop-up menu interaction.
f936978f 363
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364There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
365mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
366frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
367after moving back into it.
b87207a0 368
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369Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
370not as severely as in 21.1.
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371
372Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
373characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
374
375An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
376Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
377
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378Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.1). Some
379of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
380in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
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381characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
382work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
383you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
384the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
385ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
386appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
387yet.)
388
c24be289 389Multilingual text put into the Windows clipboard by other Windows
e085efdb 390applications cannot be safely pasted into Emacs (as of v21.1). This
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391is because Windows uses Unicode to represent multilingual text, but
392Emacs does not yet support Unicode well enough to decode it. This
e085efdb 393means that Emacs can only interchange non-ASCII text with other
c24be289 394Windows programs if the characters are in the system codepage.
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395Reportedly, a partial solution is to install the Mule-UCS package and
396set selection-coding-system to utf-16-le-dos.
397
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398* The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
399
400This can happen because the linker by default only looks for shared
401libraries, but jpeg distribution by default doesn't build and doesn't
402install a shared version of the library, `libjpeg.so'. One system
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403where this is known to happen is Compaq OSF/1 (`Tru64'), but it
404probably isn't limited to that system.
c8d9b4ee 405
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406You can configure the jpeg library with the `--enable-shared' option
407and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a shared version of libjpeg,
408which you need to install. Finally, rerun the Emacs configure script,
409which should now find the jpeg library. Alternatively, modify the
410generated src/Makefile to link the .a file explicitly.
c8d9b4ee 411
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412(If you need the static version of the jpeg library as well, configure
413libjpeg with both `--enable-static' and `--enable-shared' options.)
c8d9b4ee 414
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415* Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
416
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417This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
418(RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
419(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
420configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
421files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
422left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
423itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
cbfe0252 424Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
d9810886 425
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426In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
427machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
428(it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
429This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
430
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431If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
432(Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
433you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
434force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
435problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
436blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
437`mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
438options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
439`/etc/auto.home'.
440
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441Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
442a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
443waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
444to work around the problem.
d9810886 445
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446Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
447onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
448you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
449`/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
450
451 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
452
453The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
454
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455* Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
456
457This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
458via NFS. Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
459binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
460
461 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
462
463We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
464build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
465
9ed04369 466* Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
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467
468Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
469other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
470that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
471size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
472when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
473fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
474
475To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
476
477 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
478
479If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
480problem.
481
482The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
483`fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
484`xset fp rehash'.
485
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486* Large file support is disabled on HP-UX. See the comments in
487src/s/hpux10.h.
488
489* Crashes when displaying uncompressed GIFs with version
490libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
491
4dea3d52 492* Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
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493
494By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
495`{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
496any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
497vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
498parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
499in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
cbfe0252 500pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
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501introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
502through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
503to the end of a very large buffer.
504
505If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
506makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
507fontification by setting the variable
508`font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
509be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
510
511Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
512in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
513
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514* When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
515or messed up.
516
cbfe0252 517For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
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518empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
519background.
520
521This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
522definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
523solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
524option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style.
525
526Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
527applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
528(should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
529so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
530Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
531present or commented out:
532
533 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
534 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
535 Emacs*Foreground
536 Emacs*Background
537
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538* Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
539
540Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
541MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
542port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
543keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
544of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
545
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546* Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
547
548If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
549due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
550and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
551port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
552are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
553confuses ange-ftp.
554
555The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
556(version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
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557Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
558directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
559variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
560client's executable. For example:
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561
562 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
563
564If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
565this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
566
567 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
568
569
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570* The latest released version of the W3 package doesn't run properly
571with Emacs 21 and needs work. However, these problems are already
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572fixed in W3's CVS. The patch below is reported to make w3-4.0pre.46
573work.
574
575Some users report they are unable to byte-compile W3 with Emacs 21.
576If the patches below don't help to resolve your problems, install the
577CVS version of W3, which should be compatible with Emacs 21.
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578
579diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el
580--- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el Sun Nov 14 22:00:12 1999
581+++ w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el Thu Dec 14 14:59:15 2000
582@@ -181,7 +181,8 @@
583 (dispatch-event (next-command-event)))
584 (error nil))))
585 (t
586- (if (and (not (sit-for 0)) (input-pending-p))
587+ ;; modified for GNU Emacs 21 by bob@rattlesnake.com on 2000 Dec 14
588+ (if (and (not (sit-for 0)) nil)
589 (condition-case ()
590 (progn
591 (setq w3-pause-keystroke
592diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-e21.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-e21.el
593--- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-e21.el Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970
594+++ w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-e21.el Thu Dec 14 14:54:58 2000
595@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
596+;;; w3-e21.el --- ** required for GNU Emacs 21 **
597+;; Added by bob@rattlesnake.com on 2000 Dec 14
598+
599+(require 'w3-e19)
600+(provide 'w3-e21)
601
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602* On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
603are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
604so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
605Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
606
cc2f2825 607* Compiling on AIX 4.3.x or 4.4 fails.
ec383c7d 608
9e2305c3 609This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
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610the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
611redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
612is to use the default compiler `cc'.
613
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614* The PSGML package uses the obsolete variables
615`before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
9ec9d3d2 616longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
1d297d9b 617
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618* The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
619
620It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
621Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
622please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
623argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
624
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625* Unicode characters are not unified with other Mule charsets.
626
627As of v21.1, Emacs charsets are still not unified. This means that
628characters which belong to charsets such as Latin-2, Greek, Hebrew,
629etc. and the same characters in the `mule-unicode-*' charsets are
630different characters, as far as Emacs is concerned. For example, text
631which includes Unicode characters from the Latin-2 locale cannot be
632encoded by Emacs with ISO 8859-2 coding system; and if you yank Greek
633text from a buffer whose buffer-file-coding-system is greek-iso-8bit
634into a mule-unicode-0100-24ff buffer, Emacs won't be able to save that
635buffer neither as ISO 8859-7 nor as UTF-8.
636
637To work around this, install some add-on package such as Mule-UCS.
638
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639* Problems when using Emacs with UTF-8 locales
640
641Some systems, including recent versions of GNU/Linux, have terminals
642or X11 subsystems that can be configured to provide Unicode/UTF-8
643input and display. Normally, such a system sets environment variables
644such as LANG, LC_CTYPE, or LC_ALL to a string which ends with a
645`.UTF-8'. For example, a system like this in a French locale might
646use `fr_FR.UTF-8' as the value of LANG.
647
648Since Unicode support in Emacs, as of v21.1, is not yet complete (see
649the previous entry in this file), UTF-8 support is not enabled by
650default, even in UTF-8 locales. Thus, some Emacs features, such as
651non-ASCII keyboard input, might appear to be broken in these locales.
652To solve these problems, you need to turn on some options in your
653`.emacs' file. Specifically, the following customizations should make
654Emacs work correctly with UTF-8 input and text:
655
656 (setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
657 (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
658 (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
659 (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
660 (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
661
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662* The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
663
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664This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
665slots now. If the built-in Unicode/UTF-8 support is insufficient,
666e.g. if you need more CJK coverage, use the current Mule-UCS package.
667Any files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode won't be read
668correctly by Emacs 21.
224a0b4d 669
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670* Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
671
672The error message might be something like this:
673
674 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
675
676This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
677built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
678for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
679corrects that.
680
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681* ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
682
683This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
684defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
685runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
686
687The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
688
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689* On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
690from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
691shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
692These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
693library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
694
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695Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
696process invokes Emacs several times.
697
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698On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
699environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
700can be found.
701
702Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
703Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
704specified run-time search path in the executable.
705
8643647c 706On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
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707linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
708backtraces like this:
709
710 (dbx) where
711 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]
712 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
713 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
714 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
715 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
716 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
717 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
718 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
719 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
720
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RS
721(`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
722happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
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723forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
724to work around the problem.
725
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GM
726Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
727
0c6456ad 728* On Solaris 2.7, building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
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729C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
730compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
731release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
732another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
733and the default CFLAGS.
0c6456ad 734
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735* Compiling syntax.c with the OPENSTEP 4.2 compiler gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
736
737The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
738following message:
739
740 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
741
742To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
743INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
744functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
745
746 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
747 {
748 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
749 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
750
751Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
752with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
753
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754* Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
755
756A typical error message might be something like
757
758 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
759
760This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
761Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
762are:
763
764 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
765
766 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
767 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
768 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
769
770One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
771fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
772the problematic line(s) and correct them.
773
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774* Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
775
776The typical error message might be like this:
777
778 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
779
780This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
781tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
782files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
783Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
784when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
785required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
786its loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
787
788Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
789file could fail to load if it is compressed.
790
791The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
792file.
793
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794Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
795lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
796print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
797
798 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
799
800If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
801and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
802load-path.
803
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804* Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
805
806An example of such an error is:
807
808 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
809
810This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your classpath.
811The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
812present in load-path:
813
814 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
815
816If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
817and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
818load-path.
819
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820* Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
821
822If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
823representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
f2d176f2
CW
824ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
825version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
826systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
827ftp client. On a Debian system, type
f3d6f4ee 828
f2d176f2 829 update-alternatives --config ftp
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830
831and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
832
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833* Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
834
835The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
836work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
837was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
838work when an antivirus package is installed.
839
840The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
841mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
842or disable it entirely.
843
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JR
844* On Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
845
846This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
847when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
848cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
cbfe0252 849http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
f29d1e75 850
4593687f 851* Windows 95/98/ME crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
c24be289 852
4593687f 853When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
c24be289 854Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
94e83484 855particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
5f08ab61 856program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
94e83484 857PATH.
c24be289 858
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859* Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
860mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
861exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
862seen.
863
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864* After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working.
865
866This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
867Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
868modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
869keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
870modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
871was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
872Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
873
874The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
875modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
876and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
877which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
878the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
879modifier:
880
881 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
882
883A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
884is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
885
886 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
887
888This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
889keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
890keys can serve as Meta.
891
892The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
893keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
894
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895* On OSF/Dec Unix/Tru64/<whatever it is this year> under X locally or
896remotely, M-SPC acts as a `compose' key with strange results. See
897keyboard(5).
898
899Changing Alt_L to Meta_L fixes it:
900% xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L'
901% xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R'
902
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903* Error "conflicting types for `initstate'" compiling with GCC on Irix 6.
904
905Install GCC 2.95 or a newer version, and this problem should go away.
906It is possible that this problem results from upgrading the operating
907system without reinstalling GCC; so you could also try reinstalling
908the same version of GCC, and telling us whether that fixes the problem.
909
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910* Emacs dumps core on Solaris in function IMCheckWindow.
911
912This was reported to happen when Emacs runs with more than one frame,
913and one of them is closed, either with "C-x 5 0" or from the window
914manager.
915
916This bug was reported to Sun as
917
918 Gtk apps dump core in ximlocal.so.2:IMCheckIMWindow()
919 Bug Reports: 4463537
920
2aa82bcf 921Installing Solaris 8 patch 108773-12 for Sparc and 108774-12 for x86
0de9f9a8
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922reportedly fixes the bug, which appears to be inside the shared
923library xiiimp.so.
924
925Alternatively, you can configure Emacs with `--with-xim=no' to prevent
926the core dump, but will loose X input method support, of course. (You
927can use Emacs's own input methods instead, if you install Leim.)
928
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929* On Solaris 7, Emacs gets a segmentation fault when starting up using X.
930
931This results from Sun patch 107058-01 (SunOS 5.7: Patch for
3156909f
PE
932assembler) if you use GCC version 2.7 or later.
933To work around it, either install patch 106950-03 or later,
934or uninstall patch 107058-01, or install the GNU Binutils.
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935Then recompile Emacs, and it should work.
936
937* With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
938
939Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
940
941 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
942 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
943 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
944 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
945 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
946 /******************************************************************
947
948 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
949 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
950 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
951 XLCd lcd;
952 {
953 - char* begin;
954 - char* end;
955 + char* begin = NULL;
956 + char* end = NULL;
957 char* ret;
958 int i = 0;
959 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
960 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
961 }
962 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
963 if (ret != NULL) {
964 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
965 + if (begin != NULL) {
966 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
967 + } else {
968 + ret[0] = '\0';
969 + }
970 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
971 }
972 return ret;
973
974
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975* Emacs crashes on Irix 6.5 on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
976
977This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
978
979* Emacs crashes in utmpname on Irix 5.3.
980
981This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
982It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
983
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984* The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
985
986This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
987combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
988definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
989might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
990purposes.
991
992We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
993you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
994
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995* On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
996the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
997
998You can fix this by editing the file:
999
1000 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
1001
1002Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
1003
1004 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1005
1006that should read:
1007
1008 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1009
1010Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
1011
1012* Emacs on Digital Unix 4.0 fails to build, giving error message
1013 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
1014
1015This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
1016Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
1017
1018* Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
1019
1020Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
1021problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
1022documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
1023
1024* Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1025
1026These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1027particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1028configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1029configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1030change this.
1031
1032* When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
1033
1034When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
1035(either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
1036then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
1037correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
1038gives the appearance of "double spacing".
1039
1040To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
1041feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
1042
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1043* Failure in unexec while dumping emacs on Digital Unix 4.0
1044
1045This problem manifests itself as an error message
1046
1047 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
1048
1049The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
1050were built for an older system version,
1051
1052 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
1053
1054made the problem go away.
1055
1056* No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
1057
1058This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
1059as of 8 Dec 1998.
1060
1061The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
1062
1063* As of version 20.4, Emacs doesn't work properly if configured for
1064the Motif toolkit and linked against the free LessTif library. The
1065next Emacs release is expected to work with LessTif.
1066
1067* Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1068
1069This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1070a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1071likely to cause it.
1072
1073We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1074
1075* Emacs makes HPUX 11.0 crash.
1076
1077This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1078
1079* Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine (HPUX 10.20).
1080
1081This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
1082
1083* The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
1084Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
1085`add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
1086'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
1087
1088* Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
1089(alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
1090Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
1091earlier versions.
1092
1093--- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
1094+++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
1095@@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
1096 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
1097 (cond
1098 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
1099- (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
1100+ (insert-file-contents entity)
1101 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
1102 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
1103 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
1104
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1105* Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUC TeX installed.
1106
1107Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUC TeX; upgrading should solve
1108these problems.
1109
d7185f9d
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1110* No colors in AUC TeX with Emacs 21.
1111
1112Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
1113byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
1114
d238f982 1115* Running TeX from AUC TeX package with Emacs 20.3 gives a Lisp error
a933dad1
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1116about a read-only tex output buffer.
1117
1118This problem appeared for AUC TeX version 9.9j and some earlier
1119versions. Here is a patch for the file tex-buf.el in the AUC TeX
1120package.
1121
1122diff -c auctex/tex-buf.el~ auctex/tex-buf.el
1123*** auctex/tex-buf.el~ Wed Jul 29 18:35:32 1998
1124--- auctex/tex-buf.el Sat Sep 5 15:20:38 1998
1125***************
1126*** 545,551 ****
1127 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1128 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1129 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1130! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer)
1131 (set-buffer buffer)
1132 (if dir (cd dir))
1133 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1134- --- 545,552 ----
1135 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1136 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1137 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1138! (let (temp-buffer-show-function temp-buffer-show-hook)
1139! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer))
1140 (set-buffer buffer)
1141 (if dir (cd dir))
1142 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1143
1144* On Irix 6.3, substituting environment variables in file names
1145in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
1146
1147 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
1148
1149This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
1150003082 August 11, 1998.
1151
1152* After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1153
1154The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1155 (standard-display-european t)
1156That should be changed to
1157 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1158
1159* Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
1160
1161You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
1162supplies the `install-info' command.
1163
1164* Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key, on HPUX.
1165
1166To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1167rights, containing this text:
1168
1169--------------------------------
1170xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1171keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1172keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1173EOF
1174
1175xmodmap - << EOF
1176clear mod1
1177keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1178add mod1 = Meta_L
1179keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1180add mod2 = Mode_switch
1181EOF
1182--------------------------------
1183
17a37d87
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1184* Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1185
62c485d2
GM
1186This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1187requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1188of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1189which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1190while, Emacs will print a message:
17a37d87
EZ
1191
1192 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1193
62c485d2 1194A workaround is to not use `klipper'.
17a37d87 1195
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1196* Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
1197in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
1198drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
1199
1200This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
1201device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
1202work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
1203
1204* M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1205
1206See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1207for character composition.
1208
1209* Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
1210
1211This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
1212full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
1213/etc/hosts file, something like this:
1214
1215127.0.0.1 localhost
1216129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
1217
1218The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
1219
1220* Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs on Digital Unix 4.0.
1221
1222So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
1223is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
1224properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
1225`tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
1226in Emacs.
1227
1228* When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
1229
3d00585e
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1230This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
1231characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
1232characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
1233support for 8-bit characters.
a933dad1 1234
3d00585e
EZ
1235To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
1236this at your shell's prompt:
1237
1238 ispell -vv
1239
1240and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
1241"!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
1242does not.
1243
1244To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
1245in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
1246Then rebuild the speller.
1247
1248Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
1249version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
1250
1251Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
1252in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
1253Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
1254it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
1255spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
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1256
1257* On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
12585.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1259
1260This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1261One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1262known to work.
1263
1264* On Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
1265CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
1266
1267This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
1268
1269Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
1270events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
1271distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
1272combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
c24be289
JR
1273AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
1274to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
a933dad1
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1275
1276* Under some Windows X-servers, Emacs' display is incorrect
1277
1278The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
1279screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
1280display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
1281to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
1282
1283This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions as
1284well. The problem lies in the X-server settings.
1285
1286There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
1287running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
1288un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
1289selection".
1290
1291Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
1292please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
1293If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
1294here.
1295
1296* On Solaris 2, Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
1297
1298The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
1299Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
1300(Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
1301You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
1302You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
1303look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
1304are currently recommended for your host.
1305
1306On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
1307105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
1308105284-18 might fix it again.
1309
3156909f
PE
1310* On Solaris 2.6 and 7, the Compose key does not work.
1311
1312This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
1313the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
1314support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
1315If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
a933dad1
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1316
1317One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
1318For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
1319variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
1320lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
1321should do.
1322
3156909f
PE
1323pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
1324if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
1325libraries.
a933dad1
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1326
1327* Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
1328
1329You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
1330either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
1331calls for specifying this.
1332
1333If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
1334mail-host-address to the value you want.
1335
1336* Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs, on UnixWare 2.1
1337
1338Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
1339virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
1340the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
1341error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
1342exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
1343memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
1344
1345You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
1346But you have to be root to do it.
1347
1348According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
1349
1350 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
1351 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
1352 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
1353 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
1354 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
1355
1356(He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
1357These changes take effect when you reboot.
1358
1359* Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1360
1361We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1362scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1363happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1364on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1365
1366Here's how to do this:
1367
1368 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1369
1370If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1371try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1372to normal, do
1373
1374 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1375
1376* Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
1377
1378Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
1379supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
1380many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
1381
1382If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
1383server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
1384You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
1385
1386The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
1387display all the characters Emacs supports.
1388
4c635a29
DL
1389Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
1390missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
1391character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
1392but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
1393of this character to display a space.
1394
a933dad1
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1395* Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
1396
1397You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
1398
1399* Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
1400
1401This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
1402than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
1403lines do not overlap.
1404
1405* You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
1406video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
1407
1408This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
1409your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
1410check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
1411
1412* In FreeBSD 2.1.5, useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1413directories that have the +t bit.
1414
1415This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1416Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1417with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1418link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1419
1420If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1421file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1422
1423* When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1424commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1425
1426You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1427
1428 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1429
1430* Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
1431appear on disk.
1432
1433This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
1434remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
1435implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
1436detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
1437calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
1438where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
1439
1440* "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
1441
1442If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
1443will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
1444in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
1445did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
1446character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
1447must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
1448
1449You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
1450them to two different keys.
1451
1452* Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup, on AIX4.2.
1453
1454If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
1455without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
1456
1457* movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
1458
1459Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
1460NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
1461entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
1462listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
1463the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
1464old POP protocol.
1465
1466* Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
1467
1468This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
1469use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
1470an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
1471happens to exist on your X server).
1472
1473* Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
1474
1475This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
1476prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
1477to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
1478
1479Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
1480(src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
1481
1482* Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on HPUX 9 after you delete a frame.
1483
1484We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
1485the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
1486does not happen.
1487
1488* Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1489
1490We suspect that this is a similar bug in the X libraries provided by
1491Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1492makes the problem stop:
1493
1494105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1495105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1496106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1497105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1498
1499Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1500suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1501
1502106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1503106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1504105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1505
1506* Problems running Perl under Emacs on Windows NT/95.
1507
1508`perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
1509The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
1510
1511The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
1512"CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
1513with the user.
1514
1515On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
1516pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
1517communicate with the subprocess.
1518
1519On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
1520relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
1521redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
1522stdin.
1523
1524A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
1525
1526For Perl 4:
1527
1528 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
1529 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
1530 ***************
1531 *** 68,74 ****
1532 $rcfile=".perldb";
1533 }
1534 else {
1535 ! $console = "con";
1536 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1537 }
1538
1539 --- 68,74 ----
1540 $rcfile=".perldb";
1541 }
1542 else {
1543 ! $console = "";
1544 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1545 }
1546
1547
1548 For Perl 5:
1549 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
1550 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
1551 ***************
1552 *** 22,28 ****
1553 $rcfile=".perldb";
1554 }
1555 elsif (-e "con") {
1556 ! $console = "con";
1557 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1558 }
1559 else {
1560 --- 22,28 ----
1561 $rcfile=".perldb";
1562 }
1563 elsif (-e "con") {
1564 ! $console = "";
1565 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1566 }
1567 else {
1568
a933dad1
DL
1569* Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs:
1570
1571There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
1572
1573 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
1574 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
1575 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
1576
1577To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
1578subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
1579them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
1580incorrect library functions.
1581
f1e54ce1
EZ
1582* When compiling with DJGPP on Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
1583
1584If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
1585Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
1586program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
1587config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
1588the front of your PATH environment variable.
1589
a933dad1
DL
1590* When compiling with DJGPP on Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
1591like make-docfile.
1592
1593This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
1594variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
1595compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
1596the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
1597
1598* Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
1599run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
a01325b8
EZ
1600
1601Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
a933dad1
DL
1602immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
1603the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
a01325b8
EZ
1604and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
1605
1606Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
1607the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
1608Lisp.
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1609
1610This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
1611support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
1612characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
1613You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
1614filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
1615compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
1616explains this issue in more detail.
1617
a01325b8
EZ
1618Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
1619MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
1620by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
1621unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
1622them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
1623must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
1624properly truncated.
1625
a933dad1
DL
1626* Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
1627
1628 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
1629
1630This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
1631on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
1632value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
1633works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
1634support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
1635undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
1636[emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
1637`TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
1638your system works as before.
1639
1640* On Windows 95, Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
1641
1642This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
1643You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
1644
c24be289 1645* Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on Windows.
a933dad1
DL
1646
1647This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1648you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
c24be289
JR
1649and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
1650more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
1651or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
a933dad1
DL
1652
1653* `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
1654
1655This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
1656version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
1657definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
1658incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
1659does not work with this version of ncurses.
1660
1661The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
1662
1663* Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
1664
1665Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
1666editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
1667as GCC.
1668
1669* Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly truncated
1670on GNU/Linux systems.
1671
1672This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
16731.3.75.
1674
1675* Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1676
1677There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1678caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1679problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1680is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1681
1682Using the old library version is a workaround.
1683
1684* On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
1685
1686This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
1687version of Solaris that you are using.
1688
1689* Emacs dumps core on startup, on Solaris.
1690
1691Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
1692102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
1693Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
1694by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
1695However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
1696
1697Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
1698you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
1699We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
1700for certain.
1701
1702 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
1703 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
1704 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
1705
1706(One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
1707with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
1708
1709If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
1710bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1711
1712Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
1713Solaris 2.5.
1714
1715* Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called, on Solaris.
1716
1717If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
1718of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
1719called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
1720
1721* "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes on HPUX, in
1722Emacs built with Motif.
1723
1724This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1725such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1726
1727* On Irix 6.0, make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi
1728
1729A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
1730in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
1731find that string, and take out the spaces.
1732
1733Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
1734
1735* "out of virtual swap space" on Irix 5.3
1736
1737This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
1738many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
1739swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
1740can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
1741command `swap -l'.
1742
1743You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
1744line like this:
1745
1746/usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
1747
1748where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
1749by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
1750that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
1751new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
1752information.
1753
1754The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
1755swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
1756on the network that can log on to the host.
1757
1758If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
1759the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
1760some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
1761icons.
1762
1763You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
1764FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
1765("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
1766ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
1767
1768* With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
1769character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
1770
1771One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
1772away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
1773XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
1774
1775* On SunOS 4.1.3, Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
1776
1777This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
1778on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
1779version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
1780it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
1781
1782* On SunOS 4, Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
1783(or log out, if you logged in using X).
1784
1785Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
1786
1787* On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1788with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1789
1790On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1791`unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1792Definitions" to make them defined.
1793
1794* On SunOS, you get linker errors
1795 ld: Undefined symbol
1796 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
1797 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
1798
1799The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
1800or link libXmu statically.
1801
1802* On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as
1803 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
1804 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
1805
1806This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
1807these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
1808you build Emacs:
1809
1810 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
1811 chmod 664 libIM.a
1812 ranlib libIM.a
1813
1814Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
1815Makefile).
1816
1817* Unpredictable segmentation faults on Solaris 2.3 and 2.4.
1818
1819A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
1820the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
1821
1822We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
1823
1824* Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for
1825Windows.
1826
1827A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
1828Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
1829problem.
1830
1831* Emacs crashes at startup on MSDOS.
1832
1833Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
1834and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
1835know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
1836memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
1837However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
1838
1839You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
1840arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
1841information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
1842is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
1843
1844Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
1845configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
1846removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
1847and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
1848the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
1849
1850* A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
1851
1852twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
1853You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
1854
1855 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
1856
1857* Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
1858
1859This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
1860the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
1861Emacs's configure script.
1862
1863* Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
1864
1865This results from a bug in GNU Sed version 2.03. To solve the
1866problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
1867configure script.
1868
1869* On Sunos 4.1.1, there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
1870
1871If you get errors such as
1872
1873 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1874 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1875 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
1876
1877This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
1878to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
1879script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
1880make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
1881ones available when you build Emacs.
1882
1883* The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1884other non-English HP keyboards too).
1885
1886This is because HPUX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1887shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1888configures the X server.
1889
1890 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1891 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1892 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1893 EOF
1894
1895 xmodmap - << EOF
1896 clear mod1
1897 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1898 add mod1 = Meta_L
1899 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1900 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1901 EOF
1902
1903* The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
1904
1905Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
1906command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
1907Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
1908manager to use some other command. You can disable the
1909shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
1910
1911 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
1912
1913* Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1914
1915There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1916that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1917
1918* Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys.
1919
1920The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
1921be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
1922to allocate ptys reliably.
1923
1924* On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
1925
1926The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
1927Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
1928compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
1929workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
1930syms.h.
1931
1932* Slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1933
1934People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1935startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1936
1937This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1938Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1939improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1940networked and non-networked machines.
1941
1942Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1943
1944** Networked Case
1945
1946First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1947exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1948(replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1949
1950 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
1951
1952Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1953lines:
1954
1955 order hosts, bind
1956 multi on
1957
1958Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1959indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1960database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1961dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1962
1963** Non-Networked Case
1964
1965The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1966However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1967simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1968`touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1969file is not necessary with this approach.
1970
1971* On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
1972forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
1973
1974casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
1975after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
1976
1977 #if ThreadedX
1978 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
1979 #endif
1980
1981to:
1982
1983 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
1984 #if ThreadedX
1985 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
1986 #endif
1987 #endif
1988
1989Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
1990(as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
1991OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
1992Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
1993definition for your type of machine and system.
1994
1995Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
1996the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
1997Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
1998
1999For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
2000101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
2001to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
2002patch.
2003
2004However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
2005he changed
2006 #define ThreadedX YES
2007to
2008 #define ThreadedX NO
2009in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
2010`-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
2011typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
2012
2013* With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
2014 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
2015
2016This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
2017with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
2018another escape character in kermit. One user did
2019
2020 set escape-character 17
2021
2022in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
2023
2024* The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
2025
2026This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
2027
2028 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
2029
2030That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
2031do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
2032explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
2033the resource prevents the problem.
2034
2035* Emacs gets hung shortly after startup, on Sunos 4.1.3.
2036
2037We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2038one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2039
2040100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2041100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2042100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2043100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2044100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2045
2046We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2047which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2048
2049* Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
2050
2051This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
2052installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
2053specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
2054corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
2055the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
2056Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
2057files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
2058original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
2059not to work.
2060
2061The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
2062when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
2063is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
2064same directory where system header files are kept.
2065
2066* On Solaris 2.x, GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported"
2067
2068This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2069are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2070does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2071later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2072described in the Solaris FAQ
2073<http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2074to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
2075
2076* The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
2077
2078This shell command should fix it:
2079
2080 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
2081
2082* Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
2083
2084On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
2085with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
2086version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
2087C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
2088GCC.
2089
2090* On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2091
2092This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2093for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2094/usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2095
2096* You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
2097
2098On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
2099works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
2100bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
2101the Files menu).
2102
2103This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
2104due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
2105knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
2106workaround can be found.
2107
2108* Unusable default font on SCO 3.2v4.
2109
2110The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
2111that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
2112fonts, so it does not work.
2113
2114This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
2115the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
2116emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
2117that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
2118resources affect Emacs also:
2119
2120 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
2121 *Background: scoBackground
2122 *Foreground: scoForeground
2123
2124The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
2125Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
2126
2127 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
2128 Emacs*Background: white
2129 Emacs*Foreground: black
2130
2131(These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
2132suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
2133starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
2134environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
2135as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
2136/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
2137but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
2138Open Desktop display.
2139
2140These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
2141machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
2142
2143* rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
2144
2145This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
2146The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
2147
2148* Emacs is slow using X11R5 on HP/UX.
2149
2150This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2151doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2152because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2153libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2154those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2155install them and rebuild Emacs.
2156
2157* Loading fonts is very slow.
2158
2159You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
2160Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
2161directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
2162"fonts.scale".
2163
2164If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
2165font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
2166
2167With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
2168directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
2169Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
2170
2171* On AIX 3.2.4, releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2172
2173Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2174ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2175lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2176treated as control characters.
2177
2178You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2179releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2180
2181* display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2182
2183Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2184versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2185cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2186This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2187processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2188
2189Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2190the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2191
2192The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2193
2194* On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2195
2196This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2197C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2198
2199* Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
2200 segmentation fault and core dump.
2201
2202This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
2203added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
2204
2205 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
2206
2207If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
2208untar it :-).
2209
2210* Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2211
2212To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2213
2214 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2215
2216and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2217
2218The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2219cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2220
2221* Link failure on IBM AIX 1.3 ptf 0013.
2222
2223There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2224the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2225workaround/fix is:
2226
2227 cd /lib
2228 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2229 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2230
2231* Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose on a Sun.
2232
2233If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
2234with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
2235the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
2236libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
2237toolkit.)
2238
2239If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
2240lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
2241X11R4, then use it in the link.
2242
2243* Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'
2244
2245This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2246Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2247Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2248where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2249
2250So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2251
2252* In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
2253
2254This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
2255smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
2256on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
2257problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
2258
2259 if ($?EMACS) then
2260 if ($EMACS == "t") then
2261 unset edit
2262 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
2263 endif
2264 endif
2265
2266* An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
2267parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
2268
2269This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
2270 emacs*Cursor: black
2271(which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
2272that isn't a color.)
2273
2274The fix is to correct your X resources.
2275
2276* Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1 using --with-x-toolkit.
2277
2278If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
2279_iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
2280-lXaw in the command that links temacs.
2281
2282This problem seems to arise only when the international language
2283extensions to X11R5 are installed.
2284
2285* Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
2286
2287This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
2288to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
2289Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
2290
2291* src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2292
2293This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2294had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.
2295
2296* Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
2297
2298If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
2299resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
2300renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
2301font.
2302
2303One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
2304your font path, like this:
2305
2306 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
2307
2308* Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
2309
2310An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
2311
2312 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
2313
2314This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
2315individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
2316want, rewrite the resource.
2317
2318To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
2319-query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
2320the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
2321
2322* --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
2323
2324On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
2325unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
2326toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
2327libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
2328unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
2329and Solaris in version 19.29.
2330
2331* `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2332
2333This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2334commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2335Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2336hand.
2337
2338* --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong on BSD/386.
2339
2340This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
2341The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
2342such as bash.
2343
2344* Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies, on Sunos 5.3.
2345
2346A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2347exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2348applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2349communicating through pipes.
2350
2351* Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2352
2353Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2354sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2355delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2356program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2357means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2358command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2359obtain the destination address.
2360
2361There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2362In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2363non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
23642.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
23654.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2366have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2367of this writing, these official versions are available:
2368
2369 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2370 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2371 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2372 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2373 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2374
2375 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2376 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2377
2378* On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs:
2379
2380 Could not load program emacs
2381 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2382 Error was: Exec format error
2383
2384or this one:
2385
2386 Could not load program .emacs
2387 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2388 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2389 Error was: Exec format error
2390
2391These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2392compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2393
2394* On AIX, you get this compiler error message:
2395
2396 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2397 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2398
2399This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2400libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2401X11Dev... with smit.
2402
2403* You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
2404
2405This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
2406Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
2407character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
2408to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
2409
2410For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
2411
2412 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
2413
2414If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
2415Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
2416xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
2417
2418* C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
2419
2420You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
2421though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
2422or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
2423
2424* Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
2425
2426These control the actions of Emacs.
2427~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
2428EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
2429"load" will search.
2430
2431If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
2432of them, then try again.
2433
2434* After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2435
2436Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2437mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2438the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2439
2440Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2441you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2442operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2443configure script) that reads:
2444#define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2445This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2446the kernel bug.
2447
2448* Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
2449directly with an X server.
2450
2451If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
2452does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
2453whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
2454followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
2455it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
2456have made the key binding correctly.
2457
2458If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
2459be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
2460server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
2461default.
2462
2463If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
2464
2465 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
2466 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
2467
2468If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
2469commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
2470are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
2471modifier bit not otherwise used.
2472
2473If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
2474keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
2475some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
2476commands show above to make them modifier keys.
2477
2478Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
2479into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
2480
2481* `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'
2482
2483On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
2484file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
2485does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
2486value is just ten seconds.
2487
2488If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
2489
2490* `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2491
2492On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2493in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2494expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2495in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2496
2497The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2498anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2499
2500I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2501going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2502Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2503in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2504
2505* On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2506
2507Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2508the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2509sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2510
2511* Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2512
2513Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2514
2515* Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
2516the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
2517* Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
2518* GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
2519
2520This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
2521libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
2522shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
2523similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
2524
2525The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
2526the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
2527
2528The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
2529installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
2530
2531On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
2532
2533If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
2534then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
2535do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
2536or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
2537that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
2538be careful not to lose the others.
2539
2540Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
2541
2542#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
2543
2544Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
2545the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
2546again to say this:
2547
2548#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
2549
2550* On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
2551
2552 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
2553
2554The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
2555
2556The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
2557
2558* Self documentation messages are garbled.
2559
2560This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
2561with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
2562corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
2563
2564* Trouble using ptys on AIX.
2565
2566People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2567Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2568
2569* Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
2570
2571christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
2572
2573The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
2574execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
2575tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
2576but tty is giving it back 3.
2577
2578The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
2579word:
2580
2581if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
2582
2583should be changed to:
2584
2585if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
2586
2587Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
2588and into .login.
2589
2590* Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
2591
2592Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
2593
2594* Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
2595* `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
2596
2597One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
2598your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
2599the environment.
2600
2601* Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
2602
2603If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
2604`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
2605that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
2606with a floating point option other than the default.
2607
2608It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
2609crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
2610However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
2611floating point option: -fsoft.
2612
2613* Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
2614
2615The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
2616arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
2617tell Emacs to compensate for this.
2618
2619I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
2620whether this problem is present on a given system.
2621
2622* Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
2623 as a concentrator.
2624
2625This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
26267 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
2627
2628* M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2629
2630This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2631version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2632
2633* Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
2634 terminal type.
2635
2636The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
2637environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
2638provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
2639emulates.
2640
2641Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
2642in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
2643it only if it is undefined.
2644
2645 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
2646
2647Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
2648happen in a non-login shell.
2649
2650* X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
2651
2652People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
2653not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
2654the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
2655the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
2656
2657You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
2658However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
2659you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
2660
2661The easy way to do this is to put
2662
2663 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
2664
2665in your site-init.el file.
2666
2667* Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2668
2669On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2670may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2671is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2672As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2673
2674* Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
2675
2676You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2677
2678 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2679
2680This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2681Here is how to make more of them.
2682
2683 % cd /dev
2684 % ls pty*
2685 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2686 % /etc/crpty 8
2687 # creates eight new pty's
2688
2689* Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
2690
2691This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2692Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2693
2694It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2695space available on the machine.
2696
2697On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2698subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2699for large blocks (many pages).
2700
2701* test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
2702* or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
2703* or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2704* or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs
2705
2706This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2707fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2708binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2709
2710In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2711It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2712a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2713itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2714when unpacking the shell archive.
2715
2716I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2717what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2718file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2719
2720If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2721nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2722
2723 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2724 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2725 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2726 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2727 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2728 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2729 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2730 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2731 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2732 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2733 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2734 and remake temacs.
2735 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2736
2737* temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
2738
2739This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2740files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2741space than was allocated.
2742
2743This could be caused by
2744 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2745 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2746 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2747 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2748 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2749 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2750 deleting that file.
2751 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2752 (not from the directory you expected).
2753 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2754 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2755 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2756 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2757 the space required.
2758
2759If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2760of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2761
2762But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2763of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2764problem.
2765
2766* Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
2767
2768You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
2769Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
2770will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
2771and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
2772
2773Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
2774than the corresponding .el file.
2775
2776* The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2777
2778Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2779
27801) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2781as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2782it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2783value in the man page for a.out (5).
2784
27852) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2786initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2787of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2788not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2789may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2790
2791* Compilation errors on VMS.
2792
2793You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
2794variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
2795This is not an error. Ignore it.
2796
2797VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
2798were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
2799
2800There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
2801in conditional expressions. The bug is:
2802 char c = -1, d = 1;
2803 int i;
2804
2805 i = d ? c : d;
2806The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
2807conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
2808constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
2809
2810* rmail gets error getting new mail
2811
2812rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
2813called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
2814the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
2815
2816There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
2817the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
2818`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
2819this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
2820the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
2821IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
2822SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
2823
2824If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2825prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2826you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2827`mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
2828
2829 chgrp mail movemail
2830 chmod 2755 movemail
2831
2832If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2833prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2834you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2835`mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
2836make install.
2837
2838 chgrp mail movemail
2839 chmod 2755 movemail
2840
2841Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
2842installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
2843installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
2844/usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
2845mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
2846directory copy is ineffective.
2847
2848* Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
2849
2850This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
2851used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
2852away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
2853streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
2854user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
2855properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
2856input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
2857easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
2858
2859There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
2860
2861 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
2862 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
2863 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
2864
2865First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
2866they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
2867"no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
2868escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
2869and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
2870control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
2871
2872Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
2873needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
2874by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
2875rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
2876your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
2877it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
2878the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
2879problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
2880to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
2881
2882For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
2883giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
2884codes. You might as well try it.
2885
2886If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
2887through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
2888computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
2889much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
2890control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
2891you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
2892replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
2893measures can make Emacs semi-work.
2894
2895You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
2896handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
2897enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
2898now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
2899enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
2900control handling.)
2901
2902If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
2903is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
2904other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
2905and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
2906other control characters are already used by emacs.
2907
2908IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
2909Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
2910order to continue.
2911
2912If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
2913certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
2914`enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
2915automatically. Here is an example:
2916
2917(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
2918
2919If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
2920and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
2921manually.
2922
2923I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
2924assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
2925control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
2926merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
2927widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
2928use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
2929will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
2930of inferior systems.
2931
2932* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
2933
2934For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
2935control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
2936terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
2937that wants to use flow control.
2938
2939You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
2940If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
2941flow control, as described in the preceding section.
2942
2943If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
2944into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
2945shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
2946
2947* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
2948
2949Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
2950control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
2951On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
2952control on the local system.
2953
2954One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
2955(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
2956stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
2957"stty start u stop u" will do this.
2958
2959Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
2960around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
2961issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
2962
2963If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
2964M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
2965if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
2966following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
2967
2968(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
2969
2970See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
2971info.
2972
2973* Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
2974
2975This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
2976terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
2977the combination of features specified for that terminal.
2978
2979The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
2980Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
2981(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
2982terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
2983what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
2984and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
2985There are several possibilities:
2986
29871) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
2988
2989In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
2990need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
2991
29922) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
2993 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
2994 by termcap.
2995
2996This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
2997Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
2998and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
2999classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
3000Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
3001tested on many kinds of terminals.
3002
30033) The termcap entry is wrong.
3004
3005See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
3006that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
3007for certain terminals.
3008
30094) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
3010 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
3011
3012This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
3013in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
3014
3015* Output from Control-V is slow.
3016
3017On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
3018Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
3019to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
3020before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
3021the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
3022it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
3023
3024If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
3025that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
3026specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
3027concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
3028send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
3029fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
3030time as the operations really take.
3031
3032Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
3033at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
3034terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
3035operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
3036flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
3037an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
3038Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
3039cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
3040not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
3041is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
3042
3043Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
3044multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
3045termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
3046fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
3047each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
3048to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
3049`cm' string.
3050
3051You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
3052has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
3053take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
3054
3055A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
3056of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
3057
3058* Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
3059
3060The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
3061
3062 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
3063 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
3064
3065This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
3066
3067* You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
3068
3069Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
3070after a day or two.
3071
3072The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
3073the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
3074character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
3075of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
3076overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
3077to it.
3078
3079For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
3080and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
3081other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
3082but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
3083that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
3084important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
3085
3086If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
3087you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
3088 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
3089You can probably access help-command via f1.
3090
3091* Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
3092It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
3093but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
3094causes it.
3095
3096 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
3097 call in the RFS server.
3098
3099 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
3100 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
3101 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
3102 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
3103
3104 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
3105
3106 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
3107 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
3108 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
3109 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
3110 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
3111 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
3112 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
3113
3114 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
3115
3116 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3117 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
3118 retrieving revision 1.2
3119 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3120 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
3121 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
3122 ***************
3123 *** 163,169 ****
3124 /*
3125 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3126 */
3127 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
3128 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3129 else
3130 {
3131 --- 166,172 ----
3132 /*
3133 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3134 */
3135 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
3136 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3137 else
3138 {
3139
3140* Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3141
3142You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3143
3144 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3145 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3146
3147These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3148Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3149may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3150on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3151in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3152can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3153that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3154
3155As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3156you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3157can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3158should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3159array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3160 Lisp_Object *args;
3161 ...
3162 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3163putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3164 Lisp_Object *args;
3165 Lisp_Object tem;
3166 ...
3167 tem = args[i];
3168 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3169causes the problem to go away.
3170The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3171so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3172
3173* 68000 C compiler problems
3174
3175Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3176These are some that have been observed.
3177
3178** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3179This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3180if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3181
3182** "cannot reclaim" error.
3183
3184This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3185line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3186simpler expressions.
3187
3188** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3189
3190If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3191Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3192
3193struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3194
3195lose (arg)
3196 struct foo arg;
3197{
3198 test ((int *) arg.y);
3199}
3200
3201If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3202In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3203((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3204
3205This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3206of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3207
3208* C compilers lose on returning unions
3209
3210I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3211Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3212defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3213
3214This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3215of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3216
53854552
EZ
3217\f
3218Local variables:
3219mode: outline
3220paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3221end: