| 1 | Known Problems with GNU Emacs |
| 2 | |
| 3 | Copyright (C) 1987-1989, 1993-1999, 2001-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc. |
| 4 | See the end of the file for license conditions. |
| 5 | |
| 6 | |
| 7 | This file describes various problems that have been encountered |
| 8 | in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing C-c C-t |
| 9 | and browsing through the outline headers. (See C-h m for help on |
| 10 | Outline mode.) Information about systems that are no longer supported, |
| 11 | and old Emacs releases, has been removed. Consult older versions of |
| 12 | this file if you are interested in that information. |
| 13 | |
| 14 | * Mule-UCS doesn't work in Emacs 23 onwards |
| 15 | |
| 16 | It's completely redundant now, as far as we know. |
| 17 | |
| 18 | * Emacs startup failures |
| 19 | |
| 20 | ** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts. |
| 21 | |
| 22 | A typical error message might be something like |
| 23 | |
| 24 | No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1' |
| 25 | |
| 26 | This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for |
| 27 | Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be are: |
| 28 | |
| 29 | - in your ~/.Xdefaults file |
| 30 | |
| 31 | - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or |
| 32 | /usr/share/X11/app-defaults/Emacs |
| 33 | |
| 34 | One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a |
| 35 | fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find |
| 36 | the problematic line(s) and correct them. |
| 37 | |
| 38 | ** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X. |
| 39 | |
| 40 | This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was |
| 41 | installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to |
| 42 | specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes |
| 43 | corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use |
| 44 | the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers. |
| 45 | Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header |
| 46 | files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the |
| 47 | original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs |
| 48 | not to work. |
| 49 | |
| 50 | The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir |
| 51 | when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir |
| 52 | is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the |
| 53 | same directory where system header files are kept. |
| 54 | |
| 55 | ** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file. |
| 56 | |
| 57 | If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern |
| 58 | systems do), this could happen if the proper version of |
| 59 | ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it |
| 60 | cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for |
| 61 | libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is |
| 62 | obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries. |
| 63 | |
| 64 | The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in |
| 65 | the developer's form (header files, static libraries and |
| 66 | symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian) |
| 67 | it constitutes a separate package. |
| 68 | |
| 69 | ** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup. |
| 70 | |
| 71 | The typical error message might be like this: |
| 72 | |
| 73 | "Cannot open load file: fontset" |
| 74 | |
| 75 | This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file |
| 76 | tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp |
| 77 | files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the |
| 78 | Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later, |
| 79 | when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is |
| 80 | required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and |
| 81 | it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.) |
| 82 | |
| 83 | Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc |
| 84 | file could fail to load if it is compressed. |
| 85 | |
| 86 | The solution is to uncompress all .el files that don't have a .elc file. |
| 87 | |
| 88 | Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files |
| 89 | lurking somewhere on your load-path -- see the next section. |
| 90 | |
| 91 | ** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version. |
| 92 | |
| 93 | An example of such an error is: |
| 94 | |
| 95 | x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil" |
| 96 | |
| 97 | This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path. |
| 98 | The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are |
| 99 | present in load-path: |
| 100 | |
| 101 | emacs -batch -f list-load-path-shadows |
| 102 | |
| 103 | If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale, |
| 104 | and should be deleted or their directories removed from your |
| 105 | load-path. |
| 106 | |
| 107 | * Crash bugs |
| 108 | |
| 109 | ** Emacs crashes when running in a terminal, if compiled with GCC 4.5.0 |
| 110 | |
| 111 | This version of GCC is buggy: see |
| 112 | |
| 113 | http://debbugs.gnu.org/6031 |
| 114 | http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=43904 |
| 115 | |
| 116 | You can work around this error in gcc-4.5 by omitting sibling call |
| 117 | optimization. To do this, configure Emacs with |
| 118 | |
| 119 | CFLAGS="-g -O2 -fno-optimize-sibling-calls" ./configure |
| 120 | |
| 121 | ** Emacs compiled with GCC 4.6.1 crashes on MS-Windows when C-g is pressed |
| 122 | |
| 123 | This is known to happen when Emacs is compiled with MinGW GCC 4.6.1 |
| 124 | with the -O2 option (which is the default in the Windows build). The |
| 125 | reason is a bug in MinGW GCC 4.6.1; to work around, either add the |
| 126 | `-fno-omit-frame-pointer' switch to GCC or compile without |
| 127 | optimizations (`--no-opt' switch to the configure.bat script). |
| 128 | |
| 129 | ** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog. |
| 130 | |
| 131 | This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to |
| 132 | use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with |
| 133 | an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that |
| 134 | happens to exist on your X server). |
| 135 | |
| 136 | ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode. |
| 137 | |
| 138 | This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can |
| 139 | prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit') |
| 140 | to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs. |
| 141 | |
| 142 | Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main' |
| 143 | (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated. |
| 144 | |
| 145 | ** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by |
| 146 | a segmentation fault and core dump. |
| 147 | |
| 148 | This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously |
| 149 | added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code: |
| 150 | |
| 151 | x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks |
| 152 | |
| 153 | If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to |
| 154 | untar it :-). |
| 155 | |
| 156 | ** Emacs can crash when displaying PNG images with transparency. |
| 157 | |
| 158 | This is due to a bug introduced in ImageMagick 6.8.2-3. The bug should |
| 159 | be fixed in ImageMagick 6.8.3-10. See <URL:http://debbugs.gnu.org/13867>. |
| 160 | |
| 161 | ** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version |
| 162 | libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1. |
| 163 | Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur |
| 164 | if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an |
| 165 | older version. |
| 166 | |
| 167 | ** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'. |
| 168 | |
| 169 | This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the |
| 170 | terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo. |
| 171 | If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your |
| 172 | version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses |
| 173 | and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this. |
| 174 | |
| 175 | All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the |
| 176 | problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses |
| 177 | terminfo when built. |
| 178 | |
| 179 | ** Emacs crashes when using some version of the Exceed X server. |
| 180 | |
| 181 | Upgrading to a newer version of Exceed has been reported to prevent |
| 182 | these crashes. You should consider switching to a free X server, such |
| 183 | as Xming or Cygwin/X. |
| 184 | |
| 185 | ** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass. |
| 186 | |
| 187 | It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw". |
| 188 | |
| 189 | This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing |
| 190 | the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc |
| 191 | flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is |
| 192 | necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug. |
| 193 | |
| 194 | On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by |
| 195 | configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld. |
| 196 | |
| 197 | ** When Emacs is compiled with Gtk+, closing a display kills Emacs. |
| 198 | |
| 199 | There is a long-standing bug in GTK that prevents it from recovering |
| 200 | from disconnects: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715. |
| 201 | |
| 202 | Thus, for instance, when Emacs is run as a server on a text terminal, |
| 203 | and an X frame is created, and the X server for that frame crashes or |
| 204 | exits unexpectedly, Emacs must exit to prevent a GTK error that would |
| 205 | result in an endless loop. |
| 206 | |
| 207 | If you need Emacs to be able to recover from closing displays, compile |
| 208 | it with the Lucid toolkit instead of GTK. |
| 209 | |
| 210 | ** Emacs crashes when you try to view a file with complex characters. |
| 211 | |
| 212 | For example, the etc/HELLO file (as shown by C-h h). |
| 213 | The message "symbol lookup error: /usr/bin/emacs: undefined symbol: OTF_open" |
| 214 | is shown in the terminal from which you launched Emacs. |
| 215 | This problem only happens when you use a graphical display (ie not |
| 216 | with -nw) and compiled Emacs with the "libotf" library for complex |
| 217 | text handling. |
| 218 | |
| 219 | This problem occurs because unfortunately there are two libraries |
| 220 | called "libotf". One is the library for handling OpenType fonts, |
| 221 | http://www.m17n.org/libotf/, which is the one that Emacs expects. |
| 222 | The other is a library for Open Trace Format, and is used by some |
| 223 | versions of the MPI message passing interface for parallel |
| 224 | programming. |
| 225 | |
| 226 | For example, on RHEL6 GNU/Linux, the OpenMPI rpm provides a version |
| 227 | of "libotf.so" in /usr/lib/openmpi/lib. This directory is not |
| 228 | normally in the ld search path, but if you want to use OpenMPI, |
| 229 | you must issue the command "module load openmpi". This adds |
| 230 | /usr/lib/openmpi/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH. If you then start Emacs from |
| 231 | the same shell, you will encounter this crash. |
| 232 | Ref: <URL:https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=844776> |
| 233 | |
| 234 | There is no good solution to this problem if you need to use both |
| 235 | OpenMPI and Emacs with libotf support. The best you can do is use a |
| 236 | wrapper shell script (or function) "emacs" that removes the offending |
| 237 | element from LD_LIBRARY_PATH before starting emacs proper. |
| 238 | Or you could recompile Emacs with an -Wl,-rpath option that |
| 239 | gives the location of the correct libotf. |
| 240 | |
| 241 | * General runtime problems |
| 242 | |
| 243 | ** Lisp problems |
| 244 | |
| 245 | *** Changes made to .el files do not take effect. |
| 246 | |
| 247 | You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files. |
| 248 | Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes |
| 249 | will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory |
| 250 | and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files. |
| 251 | |
| 252 | Emacs prints a warning when loading a .elc file which is older |
| 253 | than the corresponding .el file. |
| 254 | |
| 255 | Alternatively, if you set the option `load-prefer-newer' non-nil, |
| 256 | Emacs will load whichever version of a file is the newest. |
| 257 | |
| 258 | *** Watch out for the EMACSLOADPATH environment variable |
| 259 | |
| 260 | EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function "load" will search. |
| 261 | |
| 262 | If you observe strange problems, check for this variable in your |
| 263 | environment. |
| 264 | |
| 265 | *** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error. |
| 266 | |
| 267 | The error message might be something like this: |
| 268 | |
| 269 | "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth" |
| 270 | |
| 271 | This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a |
| 272 | built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch |
| 273 | for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3 |
| 274 | corrects that. |
| 275 | |
| 276 | *** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode. |
| 277 | |
| 278 | Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause |
| 279 | problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's |
| 280 | documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem. |
| 281 | |
| 282 | *** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in |
| 283 | Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using |
| 284 | `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook 'help-mode-finish)' |
| 285 | after loading Hyperbole should fix this. |
| 286 | |
| 287 | ** Keyboard problems |
| 288 | |
| 289 | *** Unable to enter the M-| key on some German keyboards. |
| 290 | Some users have reported that M-| suffers from "keyboard ghosting". |
| 291 | This can't be fixed by Emacs, as the keypress never gets passed to it |
| 292 | at all (as can be verified using "xev"). You can work around this by |
| 293 | typing `ESC |' instead. |
| 294 | |
| 295 | *** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key. |
| 296 | |
| 297 | If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you |
| 298 | will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked" |
| 299 | in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions |
| 300 | did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do |
| 301 | character composition in the standard X way. This means that you |
| 302 | must pick one meaning or the other for any given key. |
| 303 | |
| 304 | You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign |
| 305 | them to two different keys. |
| 306 | |
| 307 | *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs. |
| 308 | |
| 309 | You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even |
| 310 | though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell, |
| 311 | or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value. |
| 312 | |
| 313 | ** Mailers and other helper programs |
| 314 | |
| 315 | *** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server. |
| 316 | |
| 317 | Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services |
| 318 | NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the |
| 319 | entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be |
| 320 | listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while |
| 321 | the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the |
| 322 | old POP protocol. |
| 323 | |
| 324 | *** RMAIL gets error getting new mail. |
| 325 | |
| 326 | RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program |
| 327 | called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using |
| 328 | the protocol defined by /bin/mail. |
| 329 | |
| 330 | There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses |
| 331 | the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file; |
| 332 | `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do |
| 333 | this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining, |
| 334 | the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h. |
| 335 | IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR |
| 336 | SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL! |
| 337 | |
| 338 | If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions |
| 339 | prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail, |
| 340 | you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as |
| 341 | `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the |
| 342 | make install. |
| 343 | |
| 344 | chgrp mail movemail |
| 345 | chmod 2755 movemail |
| 346 | |
| 347 | Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an |
| 348 | installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The |
| 349 | installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory |
| 350 | /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and |
| 351 | mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build |
| 352 | directory copy is ineffective. |
| 353 | |
| 354 | *** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields". |
| 355 | |
| 356 | This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk. |
| 357 | The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk). |
| 358 | |
| 359 | ** Problems with hostname resolution |
| 360 | |
| 361 | *** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name. |
| 362 | |
| 363 | For example, (system-name) returns some variation on |
| 364 | "localhost.localdomain", rather the name you were expecting. |
| 365 | |
| 366 | You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name, |
| 367 | (i.e. a name with at least one ".") either in /etc/hosts, |
| 368 | /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system calls for specifying this. |
| 369 | |
| 370 | If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable |
| 371 | mail-host-address to the value you want. |
| 372 | |
| 373 | ** NFS |
| 374 | |
| 375 | *** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually |
| 376 | appear on disk. |
| 377 | |
| 378 | This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the |
| 379 | remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS |
| 380 | implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to |
| 381 | detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system |
| 382 | calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case |
| 383 | where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails. |
| 384 | |
| 385 | ** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode. |
| 386 | |
| 387 | PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap) |
| 388 | as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement |
| 389 | of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load |
| 390 | sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit |
| 391 | HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode |
| 392 | (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el |
| 393 | (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error. |
| 394 | |
| 395 | ** PCL-CVS |
| 396 | |
| 397 | *** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit. |
| 398 | |
| 399 | When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examined |
| 400 | directory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous message |
| 401 | from which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committed |
| 402 | files. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer are |
| 403 | not updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines are |
| 404 | added to the top-level directory. |
| 405 | |
| 406 | This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS |
| 407 | 1.12.10 or newer to fix this problem. |
| 408 | |
| 409 | ** Miscellaneous problems |
| 410 | |
| 411 | *** Editing files with very long lines is slow. |
| 412 | |
| 413 | For example, simply moving through a file that contains hundreds of |
| 414 | thousands of characters per line is slow, and consumes a lot of CPU. |
| 415 | This is a known limitation of Emacs with no solution at this time. |
| 416 | |
| 417 | *** Emacs uses 100% of CPU time |
| 418 | |
| 419 | This was a known problem with some old versions of the Semantic package. |
| 420 | The solution was to upgrade Semantic to version 2.0pre4 (distributed |
| 421 | with CEDET 1.0pre4) or later. Note that Emacs includes Semantic since |
| 422 | 23.2, and this issue does not apply to the included version. |
| 423 | |
| 424 | *** Self-documentation messages are garbled. |
| 425 | |
| 426 | This means that the file `etc/DOC' doesn't properly correspond |
| 427 | with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the |
| 428 | corresponding pair of files should fix the problem. |
| 429 | |
| 430 | *** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs' |
| 431 | terminal type. |
| 432 | |
| 433 | The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP |
| 434 | environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to |
| 435 | provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs emulates. |
| 436 | |
| 437 | Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP |
| 438 | in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets |
| 439 | it only if it is undefined. |
| 440 | |
| 441 | if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file |
| 442 | |
| 443 | Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not |
| 444 | happen in a non-login shell. |
| 445 | |
| 446 | *** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line. |
| 447 | |
| 448 | This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too |
| 449 | smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns |
| 450 | on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the |
| 451 | problem by adding this to your .cshrc file: |
| 452 | |
| 453 | if ($?EMACS) then |
| 454 | if ("$EMACS" =~ /*) then |
| 455 | unset edit |
| 456 | stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z |
| 457 | endif |
| 458 | endif |
| 459 | |
| 460 | *** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow. |
| 461 | |
| 462 | This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the |
| 463 | full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the |
| 464 | /etc/hosts file, something like this: |
| 465 | |
| 466 | 127.0.0.1 localhost |
| 467 | 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04 |
| 468 | |
| 469 | The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems. |
| 470 | |
| 471 | *** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails. |
| 472 | |
| 473 | If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not |
| 474 | representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the |
| 475 | ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel |
| 476 | version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other |
| 477 | systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard |
| 478 | ftp client. On a Debian system, type |
| 479 | |
| 480 | update-alternatives --config ftp |
| 481 | |
| 482 | and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp. |
| 483 | |
| 484 | *** Dired is very slow. |
| 485 | |
| 486 | This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long |
| 487 | time. Possible reasons for this include: |
| 488 | |
| 489 | - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df' |
| 490 | response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds); |
| 491 | |
| 492 | - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix; |
| 493 | |
| 494 | - slow operation of some versions of `df'. |
| 495 | |
| 496 | To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable |
| 497 | `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from |
| 498 | invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or |
| 499 | (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase. |
| 500 | |
| 501 | *** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps. |
| 502 | |
| 503 | This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it |
| 504 | defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it |
| 505 | runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory. |
| 506 | |
| 507 | The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version. |
| 508 | |
| 509 | *** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors |
| 510 | from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some |
| 511 | shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support. |
| 512 | These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared |
| 513 | library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker. |
| 514 | |
| 515 | Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build |
| 516 | process invokes Emacs several times. |
| 517 | |
| 518 | On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your |
| 519 | environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries |
| 520 | can be found. |
| 521 | |
| 522 | Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before |
| 523 | Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a |
| 524 | specified run-time search path in the executable. |
| 525 | |
| 526 | On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic |
| 527 | linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with |
| 528 | backtraces like this: |
| 529 | |
| 530 | (dbx) where |
| 531 | 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] |
| 532 | 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) |
| 533 | ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98] |
| 534 | 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) |
| 535 | ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4] |
| 536 | 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) |
| 537 | ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44] |
| 538 | 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0) |
| 539 | ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c] |
| 540 | |
| 541 | (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know why this |
| 542 | happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which |
| 543 | forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems |
| 544 | to work around the problem. |
| 545 | |
| 546 | Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details. |
| 547 | |
| 548 | *** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error. |
| 549 | |
| 550 | This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII |
| 551 | characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII |
| 552 | characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with |
| 553 | support for 8-bit characters. |
| 554 | |
| 555 | To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type |
| 556 | this at your shell's prompt: |
| 557 | |
| 558 | ispell -vv |
| 559 | |
| 560 | and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says |
| 561 | "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it |
| 562 | does not. |
| 563 | |
| 564 | To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file |
| 565 | in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT. |
| 566 | Then rebuild the speller. |
| 567 | |
| 568 | Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the |
| 569 | version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade. |
| 570 | |
| 571 | Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word |
| 572 | in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by |
| 573 | Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because |
| 574 | it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are |
| 575 | spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other. |
| 576 | |
| 577 | If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if |
| 578 | you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it |
| 579 | can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell' |
| 580 | in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again. |
| 581 | |
| 582 | * Runtime problems related to font handling |
| 583 | |
| 584 | ** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X. |
| 585 | |
| 586 | *** This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used. |
| 587 | For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes |
| 588 | with a newer version. Emacs compiled with Gtk+ will then use the |
| 589 | newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily fixed by |
| 590 | stopping the application that has the error (it can be Emacs or any |
| 591 | other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1, and then start the |
| 592 | application again. If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting |
| 593 | doesn't help, the application with problem must be recompiled with the |
| 594 | same version of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, |
| 595 | it is sufficient to recompile Qt. |
| 596 | |
| 597 | *** Some fonts have a missing glyph and no default character. This is |
| 598 | known to occur for character number 160 (no-break space) in some |
| 599 | fonts, such as Lucida but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte |
| 600 | and Latin-1 version of this character to display a space. |
| 601 | |
| 602 | *** Some of the fonts called for in your fontset may not exist on your |
| 603 | X server. |
| 604 | |
| 605 | Each X font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs |
| 606 | supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires |
| 607 | many different fonts, collected into a fontset. You can remedy the |
| 608 | problem by installing additional fonts. |
| 609 | |
| 610 | The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can |
| 611 | display all the characters Emacs supports. The etl-unicode collection |
| 612 | of fonts (available from <URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/fonts/>) includes |
| 613 | fonts that can display many Unicode characters; they can also be used |
| 614 | by ps-print and ps-mule to print Unicode characters. |
| 615 | |
| 616 | ** Under X, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines. |
| 617 | |
| 618 | You may have bad fonts. |
| 619 | |
| 620 | ** Under X, an unexpected monospace font is used as the default font. |
| 621 | |
| 622 | When compiled with XFT, Emacs tries to use a default font named |
| 623 | "monospace". This is a "virtual font", which the operating system |
| 624 | (Fontconfig) redirects to a suitable font such as DejaVu Sans Mono. |
| 625 | On some systems, there exists a font that is actually named Monospace, |
| 626 | which takes over the virtual font. This is considered an operating |
| 627 | system bug; see |
| 628 | |
| 629 | http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-10/msg00696.html |
| 630 | |
| 631 | If you encounter this problem, set the default font to a specific font |
| 632 | in your .Xresources or initialization file. For instance, you can put |
| 633 | the following in your .Xresources: |
| 634 | |
| 635 | Emacs.font: DejaVu Sans Mono 12 |
| 636 | |
| 637 | ** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it should. |
| 638 | |
| 639 | This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller than |
| 640 | the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that lines do not |
| 641 | overlap. |
| 642 | |
| 643 | ** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces. |
| 644 | |
| 645 | By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace |
| 646 | `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of |
| 647 | any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the |
| 648 | vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such |
| 649 | parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations |
| 650 | in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some |
| 651 | pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification |
| 652 | introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling |
| 653 | through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping |
| 654 | to the end of a very large buffer. |
| 655 | |
| 656 | Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero |
| 657 | is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment, |
| 658 | to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with |
| 659 | indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash. |
| 660 | |
| 661 | If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which |
| 662 | makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect |
| 663 | fontification by setting the variable |
| 664 | `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must |
| 665 | be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.) |
| 666 | |
| 667 | Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example, |
| 668 | in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash. |
| 669 | |
| 670 | ** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font. |
| 671 | |
| 672 | This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE |
| 673 | 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify |
| 674 | event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send. |
| 675 | Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds. |
| 676 | |
| 677 | A workaround for this is to add something like |
| 678 | |
| 679 | emacs.waitForWM: false |
| 680 | |
| 681 | to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a |
| 682 | frame's parameter list, like this: |
| 683 | |
| 684 | (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil))) |
| 685 | |
| 686 | (this should go into your `.emacs' file). |
| 687 | |
| 688 | ** Underlines appear at the wrong position. |
| 689 | |
| 690 | This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property. |
| 691 | Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk |
| 692 | neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package prior to version 3.0.17. |
| 693 | To circumvent this problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties |
| 694 | to nil in your `.emacs'. |
| 695 | |
| 696 | To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font, |
| 697 | type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION property. |
| 698 | |
| 699 | ** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall. |
| 700 | |
| 701 | When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified |
| 702 | (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources) |
| 703 | then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are |
| 704 | correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which |
| 705 | gives the appearance of "double spacing". |
| 706 | |
| 707 | To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution" |
| 708 | feature (in the font part of the configuration window). |
| 709 | |
| 710 | ** Subscript/superscript text in TeX is hard to read. |
| 711 | |
| 712 | If `tex-fontify-script' is non-nil, tex-mode displays |
| 713 | subscript/superscript text in the faces subscript/superscript, which |
| 714 | are smaller than the normal font and lowered/raised. With some fonts, |
| 715 | nested superscripts (say) can be hard to read. Switching to a |
| 716 | different font, or changing your antialiasing setting (on an LCD |
| 717 | screen), can both make the problem disappear. Alternatively, customize |
| 718 | the following variables: tex-font-script-display (how much to |
| 719 | lower/raise); tex-suscript-height-ratio (how much smaller than |
| 720 | normal); tex-suscript-height-minimum (minimum height). |
| 721 | |
| 722 | * Internationalization problems |
| 723 | |
| 724 | ** M-{ does not work on a Spanish PC keyboard. |
| 725 | |
| 726 | Many Spanish keyboards seem to ignore that combination. Emacs can't |
| 727 | do anything about it. |
| 728 | |
| 729 | ** International characters aren't displayed under X. |
| 730 | |
| 731 | *** Missing X fonts |
| 732 | |
| 733 | XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have |
| 734 | minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font |
| 735 | name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire |
| 736 | according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display |
| 737 | characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be |
| 738 | able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u |
| 739 | C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the |
| 740 | font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont, |
| 741 | include in the fontset spec: |
| 742 | |
| 743 | mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\ |
| 744 | mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\ |
| 745 | mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1 |
| 746 | |
| 747 | ** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters. |
| 748 | |
| 749 | Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in the |
| 750 | ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts of |
| 751 | CJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets: |
| 752 | |
| 753 | GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601 |
| 754 | |
| 755 | The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on by |
| 756 | default). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacs |
| 757 | charset is decided by the current language environment. For instance, |
| 758 | in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312. |
| 759 | |
| 760 | If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the |
| 761 | characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8 |
| 762 | (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back |
| 763 | correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences. |
| 764 | If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are |
| 765 | substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose |
| 766 | information. |
| 767 | |
| 768 | ** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _. |
| 769 | |
| 770 | Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with |
| 771 | other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software |
| 772 | that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font |
| 773 | size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts |
| 774 | when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean |
| 775 | fonts have this bug in some versions of X. |
| 776 | |
| 777 | To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this: |
| 778 | |
| 779 | xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1 |
| 780 | |
| 781 | If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the problem. |
| 782 | |
| 783 | The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate |
| 784 | `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run |
| 785 | `xset fp rehash'. |
| 786 | |
| 787 | ** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21. |
| 788 | |
| 789 | This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free |
| 790 | slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more |
| 791 | flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK |
| 792 | support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't |
| 793 | generally read correctly by Emacs 21. |
| 794 | |
| 795 | * X runtime problems |
| 796 | |
| 797 | ** X keyboard problems |
| 798 | |
| 799 | *** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key. |
| 800 | |
| 801 | This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym |
| 802 | Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X |
| 803 | character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key |
| 804 | to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap. |
| 805 | |
| 806 | For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key: |
| 807 | |
| 808 | xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L" |
| 809 | |
| 810 | If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to |
| 811 | Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the |
| 812 | xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display. |
| 813 | |
| 814 | *** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang. |
| 815 | |
| 816 | Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work. |
| 817 | |
| 818 | *** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method). |
| 819 | |
| 820 | Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program |
| 821 | which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users |
| 822 | from using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'. |
| 823 | |
| 824 | One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' file |
| 825 | which can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory. |
| 826 | However, that requires root access. |
| 827 | |
| 828 | Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources. |
| 829 | |
| 830 | Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option. |
| 831 | |
| 832 | The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx |
| 833 | (Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. If |
| 834 | you want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitx |
| 835 | by another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or be |
| 836 | accustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'. |
| 837 | |
| 838 | *** Link-time optimization with clang doesn't work on Fedora 20. |
| 839 | |
| 840 | As of May 2014, Fedora 20 has broken LLVMgold.so plugin support in clang |
| 841 | (tested with clang-3.4-6.fc20) - `clang --print-file-name=LLVMgold.so' |
| 842 | prints `LLVMgold.so' instead of full path to plugin shared library, and |
| 843 | `clang -flto' is unable to find the plugin with the following error: |
| 844 | |
| 845 | /bin/ld: error: /usr/bin/../lib/LLVMgold.so: could not load plugin library: |
| 846 | /usr/bin/../lib/LLVMgold.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file |
| 847 | or directory |
| 848 | |
| 849 | The only way to avoid this is to build your own clang from source code |
| 850 | repositories, as described at http://clang.llvm.org/get_started.html. |
| 851 | |
| 852 | *** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input. |
| 853 | |
| 854 | See if your X server is set up to use this as a command |
| 855 | for character composition. |
| 856 | |
| 857 | *** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X. |
| 858 | |
| 859 | This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t |
| 860 | combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending |
| 861 | definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there |
| 862 | might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar |
| 863 | purposes. |
| 864 | |
| 865 | We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if |
| 866 | you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs. |
| 867 | |
| 868 | *** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work. |
| 869 | |
| 870 | These may have been intercepted by your window manager. |
| 871 | See the WM's documentation for how to change this. |
| 872 | |
| 873 | *** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window. |
| 874 | |
| 875 | This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know |
| 876 | a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured |
| 877 | --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work. |
| 878 | |
| 879 | *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating |
| 880 | directly with an X server. |
| 881 | |
| 882 | If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it |
| 883 | does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is |
| 884 | whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c |
| 885 | followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event |
| 886 | it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you |
| 887 | have made the key binding correctly. |
| 888 | |
| 889 | If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may |
| 890 | be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X |
| 891 | server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by default. |
| 892 | |
| 893 | If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows: |
| 894 | |
| 895 | xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L' |
| 896 | xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R' |
| 897 | |
| 898 | If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those |
| 899 | commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you |
| 900 | are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any |
| 901 | modifier bit not otherwise used. |
| 902 | |
| 903 | If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other |
| 904 | keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or |
| 905 | some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the |
| 906 | commands show above to make them modifier keys. |
| 907 | |
| 908 | Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt |
| 909 | into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs. |
| 910 | |
| 911 | ** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems |
| 912 | |
| 913 | *** Metacity: Resizing Emacs or ALT-Tab causes X to be unresponsive. |
| 914 | |
| 915 | This happens sometimes when using Metacity. Resizing Emacs or ALT-Tab:bing |
| 916 | makes the system unresponsive to the mouse or the keyboard. Killing Emacs |
| 917 | or shifting out from X and back again usually cures it (i.e. Ctrl-Alt-F1 |
| 918 | and then Alt-F7). A bug for it is here: |
| 919 | https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/231034. |
| 920 | Note that a permanent fix seems to be to disable "assistive technologies". |
| 921 | |
| 922 | *** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM. |
| 923 | |
| 924 | This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later |
| 925 | is running. If gnome-settings-daemon is not running, Emacs receives |
| 926 | input through XIM without any problem. Furthermore, this seems only |
| 927 | to happen in *.UTF-8 locales; zh_CN.GB2312 and zh_CN.GBK locales, for |
| 928 | example, work fine. A bug report has been filed in the Gnome |
| 929 | bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357032 |
| 930 | |
| 931 | *** Gnome: Emacs's xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal. |
| 932 | |
| 933 | A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence |
| 934 | into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent |
| 935 | incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects |
| 936 | other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has |
| 937 | been filed. |
| 938 | |
| 939 | *** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs, |
| 940 | or messed up. |
| 941 | |
| 942 | For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the |
| 943 | empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other |
| 944 | background. |
| 945 | |
| 946 | This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font |
| 947 | definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The |
| 948 | solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps" |
| 949 | option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option |
| 950 | is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style". |
| 951 | |
| 952 | Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other |
| 953 | applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad' |
| 954 | (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory) |
| 955 | so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for |
| 956 | Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not |
| 957 | present or commented out: |
| 958 | |
| 959 | Emacs.default.attributeForeground |
| 960 | Emacs.default.attributeBackground |
| 961 | Emacs*Foreground |
| 962 | Emacs*Background |
| 963 | |
| 964 | It is also reported that a bug in the gtk-engines-qt engine can cause this if |
| 965 | Emacs is compiled with Gtk+. |
| 966 | The bug is fixed in version 0.7 or newer of gtk-engines-qt. |
| 967 | |
| 968 | *** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed. |
| 969 | |
| 970 | This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically |
| 971 | requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions |
| 972 | of klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections, |
| 973 | which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a |
| 974 | while, Emacs may print a message: |
| 975 | |
| 976 | Timed out waiting for property-notify event |
| 977 | |
| 978 | A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that |
| 979 | comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem. |
| 980 | |
| 981 | *** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE. |
| 982 | |
| 983 | This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which |
| 984 | seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment. |
| 985 | To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager" |
| 986 | and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top". |
| 987 | |
| 988 | *** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse |
| 989 | click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This |
| 990 | is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the |
| 991 | problem disappears. |
| 992 | |
| 993 | *** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw, |
| 994 | XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with |
| 995 | one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one. |
| 996 | For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type |
| 997 | "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was |
| 998 | used with neXtaw at run time. |
| 999 | |
| 1000 | The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually |
| 1001 | want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you |
| 1002 | built Emacs with. |
| 1003 | |
| 1004 | *** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif. |
| 1005 | |
| 1006 | When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the |
| 1007 | graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter" |
| 1008 | and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the |
| 1009 | file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again. |
| 1010 | |
| 1011 | As a workaround, you can try building Emacs using Motif or LessTif instead. |
| 1012 | |
| 1013 | Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts, |
| 1014 | but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in |
| 1015 | the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog. |
| 1016 | |
| 1017 | *** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif. |
| 1018 | |
| 1019 | The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif |
| 1020 | emulation for which it is set up. |
| 1021 | |
| 1022 | Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif. |
| 1023 | LessTif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD. |
| 1024 | On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure |
| 1025 | --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most |
| 1026 | successful. The binary GNU/Linux package |
| 1027 | lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with |
| 1028 | menu placement. |
| 1029 | |
| 1030 | On some systems, Emacs occasionally locks up, grabbing all mouse and |
| 1031 | keyboard events. We don't know what causes these problems; they are |
| 1032 | not reproducible by Emacs developers. |
| 1033 | |
| 1034 | *** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color. |
| 1035 | |
| 1036 | This has been observed to result from the following X resource: |
| 1037 | |
| 1038 | Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-* |
| 1039 | |
| 1040 | That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we |
| 1041 | do not know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can |
| 1042 | explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing |
| 1043 | the resource prevents the problem. |
| 1044 | |
| 1045 | ** General X problems |
| 1046 | |
| 1047 | *** Redisplay using X is much slower than previous Emacs versions. |
| 1048 | |
| 1049 | We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when |
| 1050 | scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this |
| 1051 | happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars |
| 1052 | on the right (as they were in Emacs 19). |
| 1053 | |
| 1054 | Here's how to do this: |
| 1055 | |
| 1056 | (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right) |
| 1057 | |
| 1058 | If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you, |
| 1059 | try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back |
| 1060 | to normal, do |
| 1061 | |
| 1062 | (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left) |
| 1063 | |
| 1064 | *** Error messages about undefined colors on X. |
| 1065 | |
| 1066 | The messages might say something like this: |
| 1067 | |
| 1068 | Unable to load color "grey95" |
| 1069 | |
| 1070 | (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this: |
| 1071 | |
| 1072 | Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow) |
| 1073 | |
| 1074 | These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too |
| 1075 | many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system |
| 1076 | resources to load all the colors it needs. |
| 1077 | |
| 1078 | A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs. |
| 1079 | |
| 1080 | "undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the |
| 1081 | X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where |
| 1082 | X expects to find it. |
| 1083 | |
| 1084 | *** Improving performance with slow X connections. |
| 1085 | |
| 1086 | There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can |
| 1087 | be carried out at the same time: |
| 1088 | |
| 1089 | 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some |
| 1090 | language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using |
| 1091 | the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect |
| 1092 | the use of Emacs's own input methods, which are part of the Leim |
| 1093 | package. |
| 1094 | |
| 1095 | 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider |
| 1096 | switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the |
| 1097 | following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only |
| 1098 | after the initial frame is displayed: |
| 1099 | |
| 1100 | (scroll-bar-mode -1) |
| 1101 | (menu-bar-mode -1) |
| 1102 | (tool-bar-mode -1) |
| 1103 | |
| 1104 | For still quicker startup, put these X resources in your .Xdefaults |
| 1105 | file: |
| 1106 | |
| 1107 | Emacs.verticalScrollBars: off |
| 1108 | Emacs.menuBar: off |
| 1109 | Emacs.toolBar: off |
| 1110 | |
| 1111 | 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this |
| 1112 | forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...). |
| 1113 | |
| 1114 | 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface |
| 1115 | to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which |
| 1116 | improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness |
| 1117 | of the X protocol. lbxproxy achieves the performance gain by grouping |
| 1118 | several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together, |
| 1119 | instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a separate |
| 1120 | packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are: |
| 1121 | -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents |
| 1122 | Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems. |
| 1123 | For more about lbxproxy, see: |
| 1124 | http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html |
| 1125 | |
| 1126 | 5) If copying and killing is slow, try to disable the interaction with the |
| 1127 | native system's clipboard by adding these lines to your .emacs file: |
| 1128 | (setq interprogram-cut-function nil) |
| 1129 | (setq interprogram-paste-function nil) |
| 1130 | |
| 1131 | *** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information. |
| 1132 | |
| 1133 | This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses |
| 1134 | a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is |
| 1135 | likely to cause it. |
| 1136 | |
| 1137 | We do not know of a way to prevent the problem. |
| 1138 | |
| 1139 | *** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse. |
| 1140 | |
| 1141 | There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and |
| 1142 | that replacing the mouse made it stop. |
| 1143 | |
| 1144 | *** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version). |
| 1145 | |
| 1146 | On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus |
| 1147 | works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you |
| 1148 | bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in |
| 1149 | the Files menu). |
| 1150 | |
| 1151 | This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is |
| 1152 | due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really |
| 1153 | knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a |
| 1154 | workaround can be found. |
| 1155 | |
| 1156 | *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid |
| 1157 | parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'. |
| 1158 | |
| 1159 | This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as |
| 1160 | emacs*Cursor: black |
| 1161 | (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something |
| 1162 | that isn't a color.) |
| 1163 | |
| 1164 | The fix is to correct your X resources. |
| 1165 | |
| 1166 | *** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows. |
| 1167 | |
| 1168 | If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X |
| 1169 | resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font |
| 1170 | renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1 |
| 1171 | font. |
| 1172 | |
| 1173 | One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from |
| 1174 | your font path, like this: |
| 1175 | |
| 1176 | xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/ |
| 1177 | |
| 1178 | *** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs. |
| 1179 | |
| 1180 | An X resource of this form can cause the problem: |
| 1181 | |
| 1182 | Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0 |
| 1183 | |
| 1184 | This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus |
| 1185 | individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you |
| 1186 | want, rewrite the resource. |
| 1187 | |
| 1188 | To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb |
| 1189 | -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at |
| 1190 | the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files. |
| 1191 | |
| 1192 | *** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks. |
| 1193 | *** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'. |
| 1194 | |
| 1195 | One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in |
| 1196 | your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in |
| 1197 | the environment. |
| 1198 | |
| 1199 | *** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname. |
| 1200 | |
| 1201 | People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs |
| 1202 | not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But |
| 1203 | the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think |
| 1204 | the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD. |
| 1205 | |
| 1206 | You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil). |
| 1207 | However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that |
| 1208 | you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g. |
| 1209 | |
| 1210 | *** Prevent double pastes in X |
| 1211 | |
| 1212 | The problem: a region, such as a command, is pasted twice when you copy |
| 1213 | it with your mouse from GNU Emacs to an xterm or an RXVT shell in X. |
| 1214 | The solution: try the following in your X configuration file, |
| 1215 | /etc/X11/xorg.conf This should enable both PS/2 and USB mice for |
| 1216 | single copies. You do not need any other drivers or options. |
| 1217 | |
| 1218 | Section "InputDevice" |
| 1219 | Identifier "Generic Mouse" |
| 1220 | Driver "mousedev" |
| 1221 | Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice" |
| 1222 | EndSection |
| 1223 | |
| 1224 | *** Emacs is slow to exit in X |
| 1225 | |
| 1226 | After you use e.g. C-x C-c to exit, it takes many seconds before the |
| 1227 | Emacs window disappears. If Emacs was started from a terminal, you |
| 1228 | see the message: |
| 1229 | |
| 1230 | Error saving to X clipboard manager. |
| 1231 | If the problem persists, set `x-select-enable-clipboard-manager' to nil. |
| 1232 | |
| 1233 | As the message suggests, this problem occurs when Emacs thinks you |
| 1234 | have a clipboard manager program running, but has trouble contacting it. |
| 1235 | If you don't want to use a clipboard manager, you can set the |
| 1236 | suggested variable. Or you can make Emacs not wait so long by |
| 1237 | reducing the value of `x-selection-timeout', either in .emacs or with |
| 1238 | X resources. |
| 1239 | |
| 1240 | Sometimes this problem is due to a bug in your clipboard manager. |
| 1241 | Updating to the latest version of the manager can help. |
| 1242 | For example, in the Xfce 4.8 desktop environment, the clipboard |
| 1243 | manager in versions of xfce4-settings-helper before 4.8.2 is buggy; |
| 1244 | https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7588 . |
| 1245 | |
| 1246 | *** Warning messages when running in Ubuntu |
| 1247 | |
| 1248 | When you start Emacs you may see something like this: |
| 1249 | |
| 1250 | (emacs:2286): LIBDBUSMENU-GTK-CRITICAL **: watch_submenu: assertion |
| 1251 | `GTK_IS_MENU_SHELL(menu)' failed |
| 1252 | |
| 1253 | This happens if the Emacs binary has been renamed. The cause is the Ubuntu |
| 1254 | appmenu concept. It tries to track Emacs menus and show them in the top |
| 1255 | panel, instead of in each Emacs window. This is not properly implemented, |
| 1256 | so it fails for Emacs. The order of menus is wrong, and things like copy/paste |
| 1257 | that depend on what state Emacs is in are usually wrong (i.e. paste disabled |
| 1258 | even if you should be able to paste, and similar). |
| 1259 | |
| 1260 | You can get back menus on each frame by starting emacs like this: |
| 1261 | % env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY= emacs |
| 1262 | |
| 1263 | * Runtime problems on character terminals |
| 1264 | |
| 1265 | ** The meta key does not work on xterm. |
| 1266 | |
| 1267 | Typing M-x rings the terminal bell, and inserts a string like ";120~". |
| 1268 | For recent xterm versions (>= 216), Emacs uses xterm's modifyOtherKeys |
| 1269 | feature to generate strings for key combinations that are not |
| 1270 | otherwise usable. One circumstance in which this can cause problems |
| 1271 | is if you have specified the X resource |
| 1272 | |
| 1273 | xterm*VT100.Translations |
| 1274 | |
| 1275 | to contain translations that use the meta key. Then xterm will not |
| 1276 | use meta in modified function-keys, which confuses Emacs. To fix |
| 1277 | this, you can remove the X resource or put this in your init file: |
| 1278 | |
| 1279 | (xterm-remove-modify-other-keys) |
| 1280 | |
| 1281 | ** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen. |
| 1282 | |
| 1283 | This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being |
| 1284 | used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes |
| 1285 | away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long |
| 1286 | streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a |
| 1287 | user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a |
| 1288 | properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible |
| 1289 | input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is |
| 1290 | easy, for a person with at least half a brain. |
| 1291 | |
| 1292 | There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place: |
| 1293 | |
| 1294 | 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control |
| 1295 | 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use |
| 1296 | 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible |
| 1297 | |
| 1298 | First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether |
| 1299 | they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to |
| 1300 | "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. (For example, on a VT220 |
| 1301 | you may select "No XOFF" in the setup menu.) Sometimes there is an |
| 1302 | escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off |
| 1303 | and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow |
| 1304 | control off, and the `te' string should turn it on. |
| 1305 | |
| 1306 | Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it |
| 1307 | needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled |
| 1308 | by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud |
| 1309 | rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print |
| 1310 | your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if |
| 1311 | it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If |
| 1312 | the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a |
| 1313 | problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard |
| 1314 | to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type. |
| 1315 | |
| 1316 | For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just |
| 1317 | giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control |
| 1318 | codes. You might as well try it. |
| 1319 | |
| 1320 | If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer |
| 1321 | through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the |
| 1322 | computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how |
| 1323 | much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow |
| 1324 | control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard), |
| 1325 | you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator |
| 1326 | replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic |
| 1327 | measures can make Emacs semi-work. |
| 1328 | |
| 1329 | You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system |
| 1330 | handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x |
| 1331 | enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are |
| 1332 | now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x |
| 1333 | enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow |
| 1334 | control handling.) |
| 1335 | |
| 1336 | If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them |
| 1337 | is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose |
| 1338 | other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement |
| 1339 | and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all |
| 1340 | other control characters are already used by emacs. |
| 1341 | |
| 1342 | IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled, |
| 1343 | Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in |
| 1344 | order to continue. |
| 1345 | |
| 1346 | If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a |
| 1347 | certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function |
| 1348 | `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme |
| 1349 | automatically. Here is an example: |
| 1350 | |
| 1351 | (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131") |
| 1352 | |
| 1353 | If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled |
| 1354 | and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control |
| 1355 | manually. |
| 1356 | |
| 1357 | I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the |
| 1358 | assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow |
| 1359 | control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad |
| 1360 | merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming |
| 1361 | widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some |
| 1362 | use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I |
| 1363 | will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake |
| 1364 | of inferior systems. |
| 1365 | |
| 1366 | ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely. |
| 1367 | |
| 1368 | For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow |
| 1369 | control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your |
| 1370 | terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator |
| 1371 | that wants to use flow control. |
| 1372 | |
| 1373 | You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control. |
| 1374 | If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without |
| 1375 | flow control, as described in the preceding section. |
| 1376 | |
| 1377 | If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters |
| 1378 | into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above |
| 1379 | shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\. |
| 1380 | |
| 1381 | ** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal. |
| 1382 | |
| 1383 | This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that |
| 1384 | terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing |
| 1385 | the combination of features specified for that terminal. |
| 1386 | |
| 1387 | The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters |
| 1388 | Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression |
| 1389 | (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all |
| 1390 | terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do |
| 1391 | what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file |
| 1392 | and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal. |
| 1393 | There are several possibilities: |
| 1394 | |
| 1395 | 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual. |
| 1396 | |
| 1397 | In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you |
| 1398 | need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong. |
| 1399 | |
| 1400 | 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect |
| 1401 | of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way by termcap. |
| 1402 | |
| 1403 | This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for |
| 1404 | Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior |
| 1405 | and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are |
| 1406 | classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for |
| 1407 | Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be |
| 1408 | tested on many kinds of terminals. |
| 1409 | |
| 1410 | 3) The termcap entry is wrong. |
| 1411 | |
| 1412 | See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes |
| 1413 | that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries |
| 1414 | for certain terminals. |
| 1415 | |
| 1416 | 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be |
| 1417 | right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using. |
| 1418 | |
| 1419 | This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed |
| 1420 | in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c. |
| 1421 | |
| 1422 | ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection. |
| 1423 | |
| 1424 | Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow |
| 1425 | control characters to the remote system to which they connect. |
| 1426 | On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow |
| 1427 | control on the local system. Sometimes `rlogin -8' will avoid this problem. |
| 1428 | |
| 1429 | One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host |
| 1430 | (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the |
| 1431 | stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems, |
| 1432 | "stty start u stop u" will do this. On some systems, use |
| 1433 | "stty -ixon" instead. |
| 1434 | |
| 1435 | Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way |
| 1436 | around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and |
| 1437 | issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell. |
| 1438 | |
| 1439 | If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type |
| 1440 | M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or |
| 1441 | if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the |
| 1442 | following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind): |
| 1443 | |
| 1444 | (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131") |
| 1445 | |
| 1446 | See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more info. |
| 1447 | |
| 1448 | ** Output from Control-V is slow. |
| 1449 | |
| 1450 | On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow. |
| 1451 | Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails |
| 1452 | to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen |
| 1453 | before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after |
| 1454 | the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast, |
| 1455 | it will scroll them to the top of the screen. |
| 1456 | |
| 1457 | If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is |
| 1458 | that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not |
| 1459 | specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs |
| 1460 | concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to |
| 1461 | send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must |
| 1462 | fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much |
| 1463 | time as the operations really take. |
| 1464 | |
| 1465 | Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters |
| 1466 | at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the |
| 1467 | terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals |
| 1468 | operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of |
| 1469 | flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow |
| 1470 | an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want |
| 1471 | Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will |
| 1472 | cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do |
| 1473 | not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling |
| 1474 | is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal. |
| 1475 | |
| 1476 | Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting |
| 1477 | multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the |
| 1478 | termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have |
| 1479 | fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should |
| 1480 | each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines |
| 1481 | to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap |
| 1482 | `cm' string. |
| 1483 | |
| 1484 | You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal |
| 1485 | has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These |
| 1486 | take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument. |
| 1487 | |
| 1488 | A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount |
| 1489 | of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled. |
| 1490 | |
| 1491 | ** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters. |
| 1492 | |
| 1493 | Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear |
| 1494 | after a day or two. |
| 1495 | |
| 1496 | The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by |
| 1497 | the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another |
| 1498 | character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion |
| 1499 | of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to |
| 1500 | overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming |
| 1501 | to it. |
| 1502 | |
| 1503 | For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use, |
| 1504 | and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand |
| 1505 | other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well; |
| 1506 | but there are not very many other control characters, and I think |
| 1507 | that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more |
| 1508 | important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'. |
| 1509 | |
| 1510 | If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion, |
| 1511 | you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file: |
| 1512 | (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char) |
| 1513 | You can probably access help-command via f1. |
| 1514 | |
| 1515 | ** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm. |
| 1516 | |
| 1517 | Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal |
| 1518 | emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database |
| 1519 | entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the |
| 1520 | "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are |
| 1521 | supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within |
| 1522 | Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system |
| 1523 | uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is |
| 1524 | "colors". |
| 1525 | |
| 1526 | In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for |
| 1527 | ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal |
| 1528 | back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not |
| 1529 | use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry |
| 1530 | doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape |
| 1531 | sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make |
| 1532 | it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op" |
| 1533 | capability). |
| 1534 | |
| 1535 | Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which |
| 1536 | attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability |
| 1537 | incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting |
| 1538 | this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps. |
| 1539 | |
| 1540 | Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value |
| 1541 | of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal |
| 1542 | entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to |
| 1543 | `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible |
| 1544 | emulator. |
| 1545 | |
| 1546 | Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line |
| 1547 | option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular |
| 1548 | modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up |
| 1549 | for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors. |
| 1550 | |
| 1551 | Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode. |
| 1552 | Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on |
| 1553 | Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The |
| 1554 | recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x |
| 1555 | global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable |
| 1556 | `global-font-lock-mode'. |
| 1557 | |
| 1558 | ** Unexpected characters inserted into the buffer when you start Emacs. |
| 1559 | See e.g. <URL:http://debbugs.gnu.org/11129> |
| 1560 | |
| 1561 | This can happen when you start Emacs in -nw mode in an Xterm. |
| 1562 | For example, in the *scratch* buffer, you might see something like: |
| 1563 | |
| 1564 | 0;276;0c |
| 1565 | |
| 1566 | This is more likely to happen if you are using Emacs over a slow |
| 1567 | connection, and begin typing before Emacs is ready to respond. |
| 1568 | |
| 1569 | This occurs when Emacs tries to query the terminal to see what |
| 1570 | capabilities it supports, and gets confused by the answer. |
| 1571 | To avoid it, set xterm-extra-capabilities to a value other than |
| 1572 | `check' (the default). See that variable's documentation (in |
| 1573 | term/xterm.el) for more details. |
| 1574 | |
| 1575 | * Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants |
| 1576 | |
| 1577 | ** GNU/Linux |
| 1578 | |
| 1579 | *** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted. |
| 1580 | |
| 1581 | There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs to |
| 1582 | read corrupted process output. |
| 1583 | |
| 1584 | *** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption. |
| 1585 | |
| 1586 | If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupted |
| 1587 | due to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc. |
| 1588 | |
| 1589 | To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it |
| 1590 | executable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name of |
| 1591 | the script: |
| 1592 | |
| 1593 | #!/bin/bash |
| 1594 | exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null) |
| 1595 | exec ssh "$@" |
| 1596 | |
| 1597 | *** GNU/Linux: Truncated svn annotate output with SSH. |
| 1598 | http://debbugs.gnu.org/7791 |
| 1599 | |
| 1600 | The symptoms are: you are accessing a svn repository over SSH. |
| 1601 | You use vc-annotate on a large (several thousand line) file, and the |
| 1602 | result is truncated around the 1000 line mark. It works fine with |
| 1603 | other access methods (eg http), or from outside Emacs. |
| 1604 | |
| 1605 | This may be a similar libc/SSH issue to the one mentioned above for CVS. |
| 1606 | A similar workaround seems to be effective: create a script with the |
| 1607 | same contents as the one used above for CVS_RSH, and set the SVN_SSH |
| 1608 | environment variable to point to it. |
| 1609 | |
| 1610 | *** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, |
| 1611 | the Meta key stops working. |
| 1612 | |
| 1613 | This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by |
| 1614 | Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was |
| 1615 | modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a |
| 1616 | keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta |
| 1617 | modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which |
| 1618 | was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as |
| 1619 | Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen. |
| 1620 | |
| 1621 | The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta |
| 1622 | modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left |
| 1623 | and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see |
| 1624 | which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use |
| 1625 | the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta |
| 1626 | modifier: |
| 1627 | |
| 1628 | xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt" |
| 1629 | |
| 1630 | A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier |
| 1631 | is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system: |
| 1632 | |
| 1633 | xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps |
| 1634 | |
| 1635 | This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your |
| 1636 | keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what |
| 1637 | keys can serve as Meta. |
| 1638 | |
| 1639 | The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current |
| 1640 | keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them. |
| 1641 | |
| 1642 | *** GNU/Linux: slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems. |
| 1643 | |
| 1644 | People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that |
| 1645 | startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'. |
| 1646 | |
| 1647 | This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts. |
| 1648 | Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to |
| 1649 | improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both |
| 1650 | networked and non-networked machines. |
| 1651 | |
| 1652 | Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root. |
| 1653 | |
| 1654 | **** Networked Case. |
| 1655 | |
| 1656 | First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both |
| 1657 | exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this |
| 1658 | (replace HOSTNAME with your host name): |
| 1659 | |
| 1660 | 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME |
| 1661 | |
| 1662 | Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following |
| 1663 | lines: |
| 1664 | |
| 1665 | order hosts, bind |
| 1666 | multi on |
| 1667 | |
| 1668 | Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be |
| 1669 | indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local |
| 1670 | database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections |
| 1671 | dynamically allocate ip addresses). |
| 1672 | |
| 1673 | **** Non-Networked Case. |
| 1674 | |
| 1675 | The solution described in the networked case applies here as well. |
| 1676 | However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a |
| 1677 | simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command |
| 1678 | `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts' |
| 1679 | file is not necessary with this approach. |
| 1680 | |
| 1681 | *** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block. |
| 1682 | |
| 1683 | This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use |
| 1684 | ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well. |
| 1685 | These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where |
| 1686 | the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c" |
| 1687 | (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a |
| 1688 | blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character |
| 1689 | cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor |
| 1690 | always blinks. |
| 1691 | |
| 1692 | A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it |
| 1693 | enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting |
| 1694 | the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block |
| 1695 | cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine |
| 1696 | the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software |
| 1697 | cursor instead of the hardware cursor. |
| 1698 | |
| 1699 | To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file |
| 1700 | `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send |
| 1701 | the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to |
| 1702 | produce a modified terminfo entry. |
| 1703 | |
| 1704 | Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor, |
| 1705 | change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command. |
| 1706 | |
| 1707 | ** FreeBSD |
| 1708 | |
| 1709 | *** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console. |
| 1710 | |
| 1711 | By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on |
| 1712 | FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the |
| 1713 | current keymap to a file with the command |
| 1714 | |
| 1715 | $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd |
| 1716 | |
| 1717 | Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the |
| 1718 | definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows'' |
| 1719 | key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd |
| 1720 | to look like this |
| 1721 | |
| 1722 | 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O |
| 1723 | |
| 1724 | to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with |
| 1725 | |
| 1726 | $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd |
| 1727 | |
| 1728 | ** HP-UX |
| 1729 | |
| 1730 | *** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous". |
| 1731 | |
| 1732 | christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says: |
| 1733 | |
| 1734 | The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to |
| 1735 | execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then |
| 1736 | tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places, |
| 1737 | but tty is giving it back 3. |
| 1738 | |
| 1739 | The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single |
| 1740 | word: |
| 1741 | |
| 1742 | if (`tty` == "/dev/console") |
| 1743 | |
| 1744 | should be changed to: |
| 1745 | |
| 1746 | if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console") |
| 1747 | |
| 1748 | Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc |
| 1749 | and into .login. |
| 1750 | |
| 1751 | *** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'. |
| 1752 | |
| 1753 | On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS |
| 1754 | file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and |
| 1755 | does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default |
| 1756 | value is just ten seconds. |
| 1757 | |
| 1758 | If this happens to you, extend the timeout period. |
| 1759 | |
| 1760 | *** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps |
| 1761 | other non-English HP keyboards too). |
| 1762 | |
| 1763 | This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a |
| 1764 | shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE |
| 1765 | configures the X server. |
| 1766 | |
| 1767 | xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF |
| 1768 | keysym Alt_L = Meta_L |
| 1769 | keysym Alt_R = Meta_R |
| 1770 | EOF |
| 1771 | |
| 1772 | xmodmap - << EOF |
| 1773 | clear mod1 |
| 1774 | keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol |
| 1775 | add mod1 = Meta_L |
| 1776 | keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch |
| 1777 | add mod2 = Mode_switch |
| 1778 | EOF |
| 1779 | |
| 1780 | *** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key. |
| 1781 | |
| 1782 | To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable |
| 1783 | rights, containing this text: |
| 1784 | |
| 1785 | -------------------------------- |
| 1786 | xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF |
| 1787 | keysym Alt_L = Meta_L |
| 1788 | keysym Alt_R = Meta_R |
| 1789 | EOF |
| 1790 | |
| 1791 | xmodmap - << EOF |
| 1792 | clear mod1 |
| 1793 | keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol |
| 1794 | add mod1 = Meta_L |
| 1795 | keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch |
| 1796 | add mod2 = Mode_switch |
| 1797 | EOF |
| 1798 | -------------------------------- |
| 1799 | |
| 1800 | *** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash. |
| 1801 | |
| 1802 | This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it. |
| 1803 | |
| 1804 | ** AIX |
| 1805 | |
| 1806 | *** AIX: Trouble using ptys. |
| 1807 | |
| 1808 | People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly. |
| 1809 | Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly. |
| 1810 | |
| 1811 | *** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal. |
| 1812 | |
| 1813 | The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines: |
| 1814 | |
| 1815 | *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f) |
| 1816 | aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^? |
| 1817 | |
| 1818 | This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127). |
| 1819 | |
| 1820 | *** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you |
| 1821 | are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If |
| 1822 | so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure |
| 1823 | Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'. |
| 1824 | |
| 1825 | *** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails. |
| 1826 | |
| 1827 | This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of |
| 1828 | the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign |
| 1829 | redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution |
| 1830 | is to use the default compiler `cc'. |
| 1831 | |
| 1832 | *** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer |
| 1833 | with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown". |
| 1834 | |
| 1835 | On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default. |
| 1836 | `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal |
| 1837 | Definitions" to make them defined. |
| 1838 | |
| 1839 | ** Solaris |
| 1840 | |
| 1841 | We list bugs in current versions here. See also the section on legacy |
| 1842 | systems. |
| 1843 | |
| 1844 | *** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console. |
| 1845 | |
| 1846 | This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r |
| 1847 | C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs. |
| 1848 | |
| 1849 | *** Problem with remote X server on Suns. |
| 1850 | |
| 1851 | On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another |
| 1852 | may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This |
| 1853 | is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup. |
| 1854 | As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized. |
| 1855 | |
| 1856 | *** Solaris 2.6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame. |
| 1857 | |
| 1858 | We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by |
| 1859 | Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and |
| 1860 | makes the problem stop: |
| 1861 | |
| 1862 | 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02 |
| 1863 | 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03 |
| 1864 | 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01 |
| 1865 | 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01 |
| 1866 | |
| 1867 | Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06) |
| 1868 | suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches: |
| 1869 | |
| 1870 | 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch |
| 1871 | 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes |
| 1872 | 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch |
| 1873 | |
| 1874 | *** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X) |
| 1875 | |
| 1876 | This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris. |
| 1877 | Rebuild it on Solaris 8. |
| 1878 | |
| 1879 | *** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down' |
| 1880 | commands do not move the arrow in Emacs. |
| 1881 | |
| 1882 | You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit': |
| 1883 | |
| 1884 | dbxenv output_short_file_name off |
| 1885 | |
| 1886 | *** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use |
| 1887 | the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales). |
| 1888 | |
| 1889 | You can fix this by editing the file: |
| 1890 | |
| 1891 | /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose |
| 1892 | |
| 1893 | Near the bottom there is a line that reads: |
| 1894 | |
| 1895 | Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters |
| 1896 | |
| 1897 | that should read: |
| 1898 | |
| 1899 | Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters |
| 1900 | |
| 1901 | Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work. |
| 1902 | |
| 1903 | *** On Solaris, Emacs fails to set menu-bar-update-hook on startup, with error |
| 1904 | "Error in menu-bar-update-hook: (error Point before start of properties)". |
| 1905 | This seems to be a GCC optimization bug that occurs for GCC 4.1.2 (-g |
| 1906 | and -g -O2) and GCC 4.2.3 (-g -O and -g -O2). You can fix this by |
| 1907 | compiling with GCC 4.2.3 or CC 5.7, with no optimizations. |
| 1908 | |
| 1909 | ** Irix |
| 1910 | |
| 1911 | *** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys. |
| 1912 | |
| 1913 | The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to |
| 1914 | be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able |
| 1915 | to allocate ptys reliably. |
| 1916 | |
| 1917 | * Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows |
| 1918 | |
| 1919 | ** Emacs on Windows 9X requires UNICOWS.DLL |
| 1920 | |
| 1921 | If that DLL is not available, Emacs will display an error dialog |
| 1922 | stating its absence, and refuse to run. |
| 1923 | |
| 1924 | This is because Emacs 24.4 and later uses functions whose non-stub |
| 1925 | implementation is only available in UNICOWS.DLL, which implements the |
| 1926 | Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 9X, or "MSLU". This article on |
| 1927 | MSDN: |
| 1928 | |
| 1929 | http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb688166.aspx |
| 1930 | |
| 1931 | includes a short description of MSLU and a link where it can be |
| 1932 | downloaded. |
| 1933 | |
| 1934 | ** A few seconds delay is seen at startup and for many file operations |
| 1935 | |
| 1936 | This happens when the Net Logon service is enabled. During Emacs |
| 1937 | startup, this service issues many DNS requests looking up for the |
| 1938 | Windows Domain Controller. When Emacs accesses files on networked |
| 1939 | drives, it automatically logs on the user into those drives, which |
| 1940 | again causes delays when Net Logon is running. |
| 1941 | |
| 1942 | The solution seems to be to disable Net Logon with this command typed |
| 1943 | at the Windows shell prompt: |
| 1944 | |
| 1945 | net stop netlogon |
| 1946 | |
| 1947 | To start the service again, type "net start netlogon". (You can also |
| 1948 | stop and start the service from the Computer Management application, |
| 1949 | accessible by right-clicking "My Computer" or "Computer", selecting |
| 1950 | "Manage", then clicking on "Services".) |
| 1951 | |
| 1952 | ** Emacs crashes when exiting the Emacs session |
| 1953 | |
| 1954 | This was reported to happen when some optional DLLs, such as those |
| 1955 | used for displaying images or the GnuTLS library, which are loaded |
| 1956 | on-demand, have a runtime dependency on the libgcc DLL, |
| 1957 | libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll. The reason seems to be a bug in libgcc which |
| 1958 | rears its ugly head whenever the libgcc DLL is loaded after Emacs has |
| 1959 | started. |
| 1960 | |
| 1961 | One solution for this problem is to find an alternative build of the |
| 1962 | same optional library that does not depend on the libgcc DLL. |
| 1963 | |
| 1964 | Another possibility is to rebuild Emacs with the -shared-libgcc |
| 1965 | switch, which will force Emacs to load libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll on startup, |
| 1966 | ahead of any optional DLLs loaded on-demand later in the session. |
| 1967 | |
| 1968 | ** PATH can contain unexpanded environment variables |
| 1969 | |
| 1970 | Old releases of TCC (version 9) and 4NT (up to version 8) do not correctly |
| 1971 | expand App Paths entries of type REG_EXPAND_SZ. When Emacs is run from TCC |
| 1972 | and such an entry exists for emacs.exe, exec-path will contain the |
| 1973 | unexpanded entry. This has been fixed in TCC 10. For more information, |
| 1974 | see bug#2062. |
| 1975 | |
| 1976 | ** Setting w32-pass-rwindow-to-system and w32-pass-lwindow-to-system to nil |
| 1977 | does not prevent the Start menu from popping up when the left or right |
| 1978 | ``Windows'' key is pressed. |
| 1979 | |
| 1980 | This was reported to happen when XKeymacs is installed. At least with |
| 1981 | XKeymacs Version 3.47, deactivating XKeymacs when Emacs is active is |
| 1982 | not enough to avoid its messing with the keyboard input. Exiting |
| 1983 | XKeymacs completely is reported to solve the problem. |
| 1984 | |
| 1985 | ** Windows 95 and networking. |
| 1986 | |
| 1987 | To support server sockets, Emacs loads ws2_32.dll. If this file is |
| 1988 | missing, all Emacs networking features are disabled. |
| 1989 | |
| 1990 | Old versions of Windows 95 may not have the required DLL. To use |
| 1991 | Emacs's networking features on Windows 95, you must install the |
| 1992 | "Windows Socket 2" update available from MicroSoft's support Web. |
| 1993 | |
| 1994 | ** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows. |
| 1995 | |
| 1996 | A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this. |
| 1997 | Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the |
| 1998 | problem. |
| 1999 | |
| 2000 | ** Emacs crashes when opening a file with a UNC path and rails-mode is loaded. |
| 2001 | |
| 2002 | Loading rails-mode seems to interfere with UNC path handling. This has been |
| 2003 | reported as a bug against both Emacs and rails-mode, so look for an updated |
| 2004 | rails-mode that avoids this crash, or avoid using UNC paths if using |
| 2005 | rails-mode. |
| 2006 | |
| 2007 | ** M-x term does not work on MS-Windows. |
| 2008 | |
| 2009 | TTY emulation on Windows is undocumented, and programs such as stty |
| 2010 | which are used on posix platforms to control tty emulation do not |
| 2011 | exist for native windows terminals. |
| 2012 | |
| 2013 | ** Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameter |
| 2014 | with a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems. |
| 2015 | Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control over |
| 2016 | which font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character, |
| 2017 | use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset. |
| 2018 | |
| 2019 | ** Frames are not refreshed while dialogs or menus are displayed |
| 2020 | |
| 2021 | This means no redisplay while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu |
| 2022 | is displayed. This also means tooltips with help text for pop-up |
| 2023 | menus is not displayed at all (except in a TTY session, where the help |
| 2024 | text is shown in the echo area). This is because message handling |
| 2025 | under Windows is synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any |
| 2026 | other) messages while waiting for a system function, which popped up |
| 2027 | the menu/dialog, to return the result of the dialog or pop-up menu |
| 2028 | interaction. |
| 2029 | |
| 2030 | ** Help text in tooltips does not work on old Windows versions |
| 2031 | |
| 2032 | Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text |
| 2033 | for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows. |
| 2034 | |
| 2035 | ** Display problems with ClearType method of smoothing |
| 2036 | |
| 2037 | When "ClearType" method is selected as the "method to smooth edges of |
| 2038 | screen fonts" (in Display Properties, Appearance tab, under |
| 2039 | "Effects"), there are various problems related to display of |
| 2040 | characters: Bold fonts can be hard to read, small portions of some |
| 2041 | characters could appear chopped, etc. This happens because, under |
| 2042 | ClearType, characters are drawn outside their advertised bounding box. |
| 2043 | Emacs 21 disabled the use of ClearType, whereas Emacs 22 allows it and |
| 2044 | has some code to enlarge the width of the bounding box. Apparently, |
| 2045 | this display feature needs more changes to get it 100% right. A |
| 2046 | workaround is to disable ClearType. |
| 2047 | |
| 2048 | ** Problems with mouse-tracking and focus management |
| 2049 | |
| 2050 | There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the |
| 2051 | mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first |
| 2052 | frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame |
| 2053 | after moving back into it. |
| 2054 | |
| 2055 | Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although |
| 2056 | not as severely as in 21.1. |
| 2057 | |
| 2058 | An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows |
| 2059 | Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed. |
| 2060 | |
| 2061 | ** Problems with Windows input methods |
| 2062 | |
| 2063 | Some of the Windows input methods cause the keyboard to send |
| 2064 | characters encoded in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 |
| 2065 | for Latin-1 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To |
| 2066 | make these input methods work with Emacs on Windows 9X, you might need |
| 2067 | to set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after you |
| 2068 | activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate the |
| 2069 | Hebrew input method, type this: |
| 2070 | |
| 2071 | C-x RET k hebrew-iso-8bit RET |
| 2072 | |
| 2073 | In addition, to use these Windows input methods, you might need to set |
| 2074 | your "Language for non-Unicode programs" (on Windows XP, this is on |
| 2075 | the Advanced tab of Regional Settings) to the language of the input |
| 2076 | method. |
| 2077 | |
| 2078 | To bind keys that produce non-ASCII characters with modifiers, you |
| 2079 | must specify raw byte codes. For instance, if you want to bind |
| 2080 | META-a-grave to a command, you need to specify this in your `~/.emacs': |
| 2081 | |
| 2082 | (global-set-key [?\M-\340] ...) |
| 2083 | |
| 2084 | The above example is for the Latin-1 environment where the byte code |
| 2085 | of the encoded a-grave is 340 octal. For other environments, use the |
| 2086 | encoding appropriate to that environment. |
| 2087 | |
| 2088 | ** Problems with the %b format specifier for format-time-string |
| 2089 | |
| 2090 | The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated |
| 2091 | month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions |
| 2092 | of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system |
| 2093 | library function. |
| 2094 | |
| 2095 | ** Problems with set-time-zone-rule function |
| 2096 | |
| 2097 | The function set-time-zone-rule gives incorrect results for many |
| 2098 | non-US timezones. This is due to over-simplistic handling of |
| 2099 | daylight savings switchovers by the Windows libraries. |
| 2100 | |
| 2101 | ** Files larger than 4GB report wrong size |
| 2102 | |
| 2103 | Files larger than 4GB cause overflow in the size (represented as a |
| 2104 | 32-bit integer) reported by `file-attributes'. This affects Dired as |
| 2105 | well, since the Windows port uses a Lisp emulation of `ls' that relies |
| 2106 | on `file-attributes'. |
| 2107 | |
| 2108 | ** Playing sound doesn't support the :data method |
| 2109 | |
| 2110 | Sound playing is not supported with the `:data DATA' key-value pair. |
| 2111 | You _must_ use the `:file FILE' method. |
| 2112 | |
| 2113 | ** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows. |
| 2114 | |
| 2115 | This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If |
| 2116 | you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt |
| 2117 | and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A |
| 2118 | more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination, |
| 2119 | or disable it in the "Regional and Language Options" applet of the |
| 2120 | Control Panel. (The exact sequence of mouse clicks in the "Regional |
| 2121 | and Language Options" applet needed to find the key combination that |
| 2122 | changes the keyboard layout depends on your Windows version; for XP, |
| 2123 | in the Languages tab, click "Details" and then "Key Settings".) |
| 2124 | |
| 2125 | ** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work. |
| 2126 | |
| 2127 | Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the |
| 2128 | MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash |
| 2129 | port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the |
| 2130 | keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports |
| 2131 | of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.) |
| 2132 | |
| 2133 | ** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs. |
| 2134 | |
| 2135 | If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be |
| 2136 | due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it |
| 2137 | and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows |
| 2138 | port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses |
| 2139 | are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which |
| 2140 | confuses ange-ftp. |
| 2141 | |
| 2142 | The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL |
| 2143 | (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock |
| 2144 | Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT' |
| 2145 | directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the |
| 2146 | variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the |
| 2147 | client's executable. For example: |
| 2148 | |
| 2149 | (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe") |
| 2150 | |
| 2151 | If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around |
| 2152 | this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file: |
| 2153 | |
| 2154 | (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "") |
| 2155 | |
| 2156 | ** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers. |
| 2157 | |
| 2158 | This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is |
| 2159 | likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific. |
| 2160 | |
| 2161 | Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not |
| 2162 | print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical |
| 2163 | printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows's basic |
| 2164 | built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it |
| 2165 | has): |
| 2166 | |
| 2167 | (setq printer-name "") ; notepad takes the default |
| 2168 | (setq lpr-command "notepad") ; notepad |
| 2169 | (setq lpr-switches nil) ; not needed |
| 2170 | (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ; run notepad as batch printer |
| 2171 | |
| 2172 | ** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs. |
| 2173 | |
| 2174 | The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't |
| 2175 | work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET" |
| 2176 | was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't |
| 2177 | work when an antivirus package is installed. |
| 2178 | |
| 2179 | The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive |
| 2180 | mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall |
| 2181 | or disable it entirely. |
| 2182 | |
| 2183 | ** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event. |
| 2184 | |
| 2185 | This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows |
| 2186 | programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many |
| 2187 | mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something |
| 2188 | different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a |
| 2189 | middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to |
| 2190 | "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a |
| 2191 | generic mouse driver might help. |
| 2192 | |
| 2193 | ** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window. |
| 2194 | |
| 2195 | This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of |
| 2196 | generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar |
| 2197 | movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple |
| 2198 | scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help. |
| 2199 | |
| 2200 | ** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be |
| 2201 | mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know |
| 2202 | exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've |
| 2203 | seen. |
| 2204 | |
| 2205 | ** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand |
| 2206 | CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character. |
| 2207 | |
| 2208 | This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control. |
| 2209 | |
| 2210 | Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key |
| 2211 | events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot |
| 2212 | distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl |
| 2213 | combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that |
| 2214 | AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set |
| 2215 | to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt. |
| 2216 | |
| 2217 | ** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs's display is incorrect. |
| 2218 | |
| 2219 | The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the |
| 2220 | screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective |
| 2221 | display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen |
| 2222 | to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear. |
| 2223 | |
| 2224 | This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions |
| 2225 | as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The |
| 2226 | problem lies in the X-server settings. |
| 2227 | |
| 2228 | There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by |
| 2229 | running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then |
| 2230 | un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X |
| 2231 | selection". |
| 2232 | |
| 2233 | If this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then |
| 2234 | please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix. |
| 2235 | If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it here. |
| 2236 | |
| 2237 | * Build-time problems |
| 2238 | |
| 2239 | ** Configuration |
| 2240 | |
| 2241 | *** `configure' warns ``accepted by the compiler, rejected by the preprocessor''. |
| 2242 | |
| 2243 | This indicates a mismatch between the C compiler and preprocessor that |
| 2244 | configure is using. For example, on Solaris 10 trying to use |
| 2245 | CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc (the Sun Studio compiler) together with |
| 2246 | CPP=/usr/ccs/lib/cpp can result in errors of this form (you may also |
| 2247 | see the error ``"/usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h", line 500: undefined control''). |
| 2248 | |
| 2249 | The solution is to tell configure to use the correct C preprocessor |
| 2250 | for your C compiler (CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E" in the above |
| 2251 | example). |
| 2252 | |
| 2253 | ** Compilation |
| 2254 | |
| 2255 | *** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''. |
| 2256 | |
| 2257 | This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system |
| 2258 | (Red Hat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris |
| 2259 | (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that |
| 2260 | configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the |
| 2261 | files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is |
| 2262 | left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping |
| 2263 | itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped |
| 2264 | Emacs executable to fail with the above message. |
| 2265 | |
| 2266 | In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the |
| 2267 | machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make |
| 2268 | (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future). |
| 2269 | This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems. |
| 2270 | |
| 2271 | If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05 |
| 2272 | (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if |
| 2273 | you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can |
| 2274 | force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the |
| 2275 | problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB |
| 2276 | blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the |
| 2277 | `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount |
| 2278 | options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as |
| 2279 | `/etc/auto.home'. |
| 2280 | |
| 2281 | Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for |
| 2282 | a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case, |
| 2283 | waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed |
| 2284 | to work around the problem. |
| 2285 | |
| 2286 | Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory |
| 2287 | onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and |
| 2288 | you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the |
| 2289 | `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble: |
| 2290 | |
| 2291 | marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted... |
| 2292 | |
| 2293 | The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'. |
| 2294 | |
| 2295 | *** Building a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit GNU/Linux architecture. |
| 2296 | |
| 2297 | First ensure that the necessary 32-bit system libraries and include |
| 2298 | files are installed. Then use: |
| 2299 | |
| 2300 | env CC="gcc -m32" ./configure --build=i386-linux-gnu --x-libraries=/usr/lib |
| 2301 | |
| 2302 | (using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system). |
| 2303 | |
| 2304 | *** Building Emacs for Cygwin can fail with GCC 3 |
| 2305 | |
| 2306 | As of Emacs 22.1, there have been stability problems with Cygwin |
| 2307 | builds of Emacs using GCC 3. Cygwin users are advised to use GCC 4. |
| 2308 | |
| 2309 | *** Building Emacs 23.3 and later will fail under Cygwin 1.5.19 |
| 2310 | |
| 2311 | This is a consequence of a change to src/dired.c on 2010-07-27. The |
| 2312 | issue is that Cygwin 1.5.19 did not have d_ino in 'struct dirent'. |
| 2313 | See |
| 2314 | |
| 2315 | http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-07/msg01266.html |
| 2316 | |
| 2317 | *** Building the native MS-Windows port fails due to unresolved externals |
| 2318 | |
| 2319 | The linker error messages look like this: |
| 2320 | |
| 2321 | oo-spd/i386/ctags.o:ctags.c:(.text+0x156e): undefined reference to `_imp__re_set_syntax' |
| 2322 | collect2: ld returned 1 exit status |
| 2323 | |
| 2324 | This happens because GCC finds an incompatible header regex.h |
| 2325 | somewhere on the include path, before the version of regex.h supplied |
| 2326 | with Emacs. One such incompatible version of regex.h is part of the |
| 2327 | GnuWin32 Regex package. |
| 2328 | |
| 2329 | The solution is to remove the incompatible regex.h from the include |
| 2330 | path, when compiling Emacs. Alternatively, re-run the configure.bat |
| 2331 | script with the "-isystem C:/GnuWin32/include" switch (adapt for your |
| 2332 | system's place where you keep the GnuWin32 include files) -- this will |
| 2333 | cause the compiler to search headers in the directories specified by |
| 2334 | the Emacs Makefile _before_ it looks in the GnuWin32 include |
| 2335 | directories. |
| 2336 | |
| 2337 | *** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail. |
| 2338 | |
| 2339 | Emacs may not build using some Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin |
| 2340 | version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be |
| 2341 | necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define |
| 2342 | __MSVCRT__, like so: |
| 2343 | |
| 2344 | configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__ |
| 2345 | |
| 2346 | *** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure. |
| 2347 | |
| 2348 | Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem |
| 2349 | to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that |
| 2350 | fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead. |
| 2351 | |
| 2352 | *** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails. |
| 2353 | |
| 2354 | This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which |
| 2355 | defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following |
| 2356 | patch to assert.h should solve this: |
| 2357 | |
| 2358 | *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999 |
| 2359 | --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001 |
| 2360 | *************** |
| 2361 | *** 41,47 **** |
| 2362 | /* |
| 2363 | * If not debugging, assert does nothing. |
| 2364 | */ |
| 2365 | ! #define assert(x) ((void)0); |
| 2366 | |
| 2367 | #else /* debugging enabled */ |
| 2368 | |
| 2369 | --- 41,47 ---- |
| 2370 | /* |
| 2371 | * If not debugging, assert does nothing. |
| 2372 | */ |
| 2373 | ! #define assert(x) ((void)0) |
| 2374 | |
| 2375 | #else /* debugging enabled */ |
| 2376 | |
| 2377 | |
| 2378 | *** Building the MS-Windows port with Visual Studio 2005 fails. |
| 2379 | |
| 2380 | Microsoft no longer ships the single threaded version of the C library |
| 2381 | with their compiler, and the multithreaded static library is missing |
| 2382 | some functions that Microsoft have deemed non-threadsafe. The |
| 2383 | dynamically linked C library has all the functions, but there is a |
| 2384 | conflict between the versions of malloc in the DLL and in Emacs, which |
| 2385 | is not resolvable due to the way Windows does dynamic linking. |
| 2386 | |
| 2387 | We recommend the use of the MinGW port of GCC for compiling Emacs, as |
| 2388 | not only does it not suffer these problems, but it is also Free |
| 2389 | software like Emacs. |
| 2390 | |
| 2391 | *** Building the MS-Windows port with Visual Studio fails compiling emacs.rc |
| 2392 | |
| 2393 | If the build fails with the following message then the problem |
| 2394 | described here most likely applies: |
| 2395 | |
| 2396 | ../nt/emacs.rc(1) : error RC2176 : old DIB in icons\emacs.ico; pass it |
| 2397 | through SDKPAINT |
| 2398 | |
| 2399 | The Emacs icon contains a high resolution PNG icon for Vista, which is |
| 2400 | not recognized by older versions of the resource compiler. There are |
| 2401 | several workarounds for this problem: |
| 2402 | 1. Use Free MinGW tools to compile, which do not have this problem. |
| 2403 | 2. Install the latest Windows SDK. |
| 2404 | 3. Replace emacs.ico with an older or edited icon. |
| 2405 | |
| 2406 | *** Building the MS-Windows port complains about unknown escape sequences. |
| 2407 | |
| 2408 | Errors and warnings can look like this: |
| 2409 | |
| 2410 | w32.c:1959:27: error: \x used with no following hex digits |
| 2411 | w32.c:1959:27: warning: unknown escape sequence '\i' |
| 2412 | |
| 2413 | This happens when paths using backslashes are passed to the compiler or |
| 2414 | linker (via -I and possibly other compiler flags); when these paths are |
| 2415 | included in source code, the backslashes are interpreted as escape sequences. |
| 2416 | See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2010-07/msg00995.html |
| 2417 | |
| 2418 | The fix is to use forward slashes in all paths passed to the compiler. |
| 2419 | |
| 2420 | ** Linking |
| 2421 | |
| 2422 | *** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an |
| 2423 | undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs. |
| 2424 | |
| 2425 | This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built |
| 2426 | with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than |
| 2427 | GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions |
| 2428 | from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system |
| 2429 | compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the |
| 2430 | link stage. |
| 2431 | |
| 2432 | A solution is to link with GCC, like this: |
| 2433 | |
| 2434 | make CC=gcc |
| 2435 | |
| 2436 | Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs |
| 2437 | with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs. |
| 2438 | |
| 2439 | *** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun. |
| 2440 | |
| 2441 | To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as |
| 2442 | |
| 2443 | /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1 |
| 2444 | |
| 2445 | and you need to add -lansi just before -lc. |
| 2446 | |
| 2447 | The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we |
| 2448 | cannot easily arrange to supply them. |
| 2449 | |
| 2450 | *** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses. |
| 2451 | |
| 2452 | This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in |
| 2453 | version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a |
| 2454 | definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also |
| 2455 | incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support |
| 2456 | does not work with this version of ncurses. |
| 2457 | |
| 2458 | The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2. |
| 2459 | |
| 2460 | ** Bootstrapping |
| 2461 | |
| 2462 | Bootstrapping (compiling the .el files) is normally only necessary |
| 2463 | with development builds, since the .elc files are pre-compiled in releases. |
| 2464 | |
| 2465 | *** "No rule to make target" with Ubuntu 8.04 make 3.81-3build1 |
| 2466 | |
| 2467 | Compiling the lisp files fails at random places, complaining: |
| 2468 | "No rule to make target `/path/to/some/lisp.elc'". |
| 2469 | The causes of this problem are not understood. Using GNU make 3.81 compiled |
| 2470 | from source, rather than the Ubuntu version, worked. |
| 2471 | See <URL:http://debbugs.gnu.org/327, <URL:http://debbugs.gnu.org/821>. |
| 2472 | |
| 2473 | ** Dumping |
| 2474 | |
| 2475 | *** Segfault during `make bootstrap' under the Linux kernel. |
| 2476 | |
| 2477 | In Red Hat Linux kernels, "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by |
| 2478 | default, which creates a different memory layout that can break the |
| 2479 | emacs dumper. Emacs tries to handle this at build time, but if this |
| 2480 | fails, the following instructions may be useful. |
| 2481 | |
| 2482 | Exec-shield is enabled on your system if |
| 2483 | |
| 2484 | cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield |
| 2485 | |
| 2486 | prints a value other than 0. (Please read your system documentation |
| 2487 | for more details on Exec-shield and associated commands.) |
| 2488 | |
| 2489 | Additionally, Linux kernel versions since 2.6.12 randomize the virtual |
| 2490 | address space of a process by default. If this feature is enabled on |
| 2491 | your system, then |
| 2492 | |
| 2493 | cat /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space |
| 2494 | |
| 2495 | prints a value other than 0. |
| 2496 | |
| 2497 | When these features are enabled, building Emacs may segfault during |
| 2498 | the execution of this command: |
| 2499 | |
| 2500 | ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap] |
| 2501 | |
| 2502 | To work around this problem, you can temporarily disable these |
| 2503 | features while building Emacs. You can do so using the following |
| 2504 | commands (as root). Remember to re-enable them when you are done, |
| 2505 | by echoing the original values back to the files. |
| 2506 | |
| 2507 | echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield |
| 2508 | echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space |
| 2509 | |
| 2510 | Or, on x86, you can try using the `setarch' command when running |
| 2511 | temacs, like this: |
| 2512 | |
| 2513 | setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap] |
| 2514 | |
| 2515 | or |
| 2516 | |
| 2517 | setarch i386 -R make |
| 2518 | |
| 2519 | (The -R option disables address space randomization.) |
| 2520 | |
| 2521 | *** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted". |
| 2522 | |
| 2523 | This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el files during |
| 2524 | `temacs --batch --load loadup dump' took up more space than was allocated. |
| 2525 | |
| 2526 | This could be caused by |
| 2527 | 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files |
| 2528 | 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el |
| 2529 | 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files. |
| 2530 | Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard; |
| 2531 | if you have received Emacs from some other site and it contains a |
| 2532 | site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider deleting that file. |
| 2533 | 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files |
| 2534 | (not from the directory you expected). |
| 2535 | 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist. |
| 2536 | This would cause the source files (.el files) to be |
| 2537 | loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose. |
| 2538 | 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates the space required. |
| 2539 | |
| 2540 | If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition |
| 2541 | of PURESIZE in puresize.h. |
| 2542 | |
| 2543 | But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence |
| 2544 | of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real problem. |
| 2545 | |
| 2546 | *** OpenBSD 4.0 macppc: Segfault during dumping. |
| 2547 | |
| 2548 | The build aborts with signal 11 when the command `./temacs --batch |
| 2549 | --load loadup bootstrap' tries to load files.el. A workaround seems |
| 2550 | to be to reduce the level of compiler optimization used during the |
| 2551 | build (from -O2 to -O1). It is possible this is an OpenBSD |
| 2552 | GCC problem specific to the macppc architecture, possibly only |
| 2553 | occurring with older versions of GCC (e.g. 3.3.5). |
| 2554 | |
| 2555 | *** openSUSE 10.3: Segfault in bcopy during dumping. |
| 2556 | |
| 2557 | This is due to a bug in the bcopy implementation in openSUSE 10.3. |
| 2558 | It is/will be fixed in an openSUSE update. |
| 2559 | |
| 2560 | ** First execution |
| 2561 | |
| 2562 | *** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run. |
| 2563 | |
| 2564 | This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted |
| 2565 | via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server. |
| 2566 | Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of |
| 2567 | binary null characters, and the `file' utility says: |
| 2568 | |
| 2569 | emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators |
| 2570 | |
| 2571 | We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to |
| 2572 | build Emacs in a directory on a local disk. |
| 2573 | |
| 2574 | *** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data. |
| 2575 | |
| 2576 | On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined |
| 2577 | as a macro. If the definition (in both unex*.c and malloc.c) is wrong, |
| 2578 | it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct |
| 2579 | value in the man page for a.out (5). |
| 2580 | |
| 2581 | * Problems on legacy systems |
| 2582 | |
| 2583 | This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software. |
| 2584 | If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000, |
| 2585 | it is unlikely you will see any of these. |
| 2586 | |
| 2587 | *** Solaris 2.x |
| 2588 | |
| 2589 | **** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun. |
| 2590 | |
| 2591 | Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of editfns.c. |
| 2592 | The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such as GCC. |
| 2593 | |
| 2594 | **** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called. |
| 2595 | |
| 2596 | If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2 |
| 2597 | of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is |
| 2598 | called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC. |
| 2599 | |
| 2600 | **** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time). |
| 2601 | |
| 2602 | This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise |
| 2603 | version of Solaris that you are using. |
| 2604 | |
| 2605 | **** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported". |
| 2606 | |
| 2607 | This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you |
| 2608 | are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this |
| 2609 | does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or |
| 2610 | later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as |
| 2611 | described in the Solaris FAQ |
| 2612 | <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is |
| 2613 | to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later. |
| 2614 | |
| 2615 | **** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15 |
| 2616 | C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to |
| 2617 | compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C |
| 2618 | release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on |
| 2619 | another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler |
| 2620 | and the default CFLAGS. |
| 2621 | |
| 2622 | **** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif. |
| 2623 | |
| 2624 | The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1. |
| 2625 | Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host. |
| 2626 | (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.) |
| 2627 | You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too. |
| 2628 | You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/; |
| 2629 | look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches |
| 2630 | are currently recommended for your host. |
| 2631 | |
| 2632 | On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch |
| 2633 | 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed. |
| 2634 | 105284-18 might fix it again. |
| 2635 | |
| 2636 | **** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work. |
| 2637 | |
| 2638 | This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for |
| 2639 | the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun |
| 2640 | support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch. |
| 2641 | If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711. |
| 2642 | |
| 2643 | One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters. |
| 2644 | For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment |
| 2645 | variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale |
| 2646 | lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX" |
| 2647 | should do. |
| 2648 | |
| 2649 | pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work |
| 2650 | if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11 libraries. |
| 2651 | |
| 2652 | ** MS-Windows 95, 98, ME, and NT |
| 2653 | |
| 2654 | *** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs |
| 2655 | |
| 2656 | `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell. |
| 2657 | The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95). |
| 2658 | |
| 2659 | The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to |
| 2660 | "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting |
| 2661 | with the user. |
| 2662 | |
| 2663 | On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a |
| 2664 | pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to |
| 2665 | communicate with the subprocess. |
| 2666 | |
| 2667 | On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the |
| 2668 | relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be |
| 2669 | redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as |
| 2670 | stdin. |
| 2671 | |
| 2672 | A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON. |
| 2673 | |
| 2674 | For Perl 4: |
| 2675 | |
| 2676 | *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993 |
| 2677 | --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996 |
| 2678 | *************** |
| 2679 | *** 68,74 **** |
| 2680 | $rcfile=".perldb"; |
| 2681 | } |
| 2682 | else { |
| 2683 | ! $console = "con"; |
| 2684 | $rcfile="perldb.ini"; |
| 2685 | } |
| 2686 | |
| 2687 | --- 68,74 ---- |
| 2688 | $rcfile=".perldb"; |
| 2689 | } |
| 2690 | else { |
| 2691 | ! $console = ""; |
| 2692 | $rcfile="perldb.ini"; |
| 2693 | } |
| 2694 | |
| 2695 | |
| 2696 | For Perl 5: |
| 2697 | *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995 |
| 2698 | --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996 |
| 2699 | *************** |
| 2700 | *** 22,28 **** |
| 2701 | $rcfile=".perldb"; |
| 2702 | } |
| 2703 | elsif (-e "con") { |
| 2704 | ! $console = "con"; |
| 2705 | $rcfile="perldb.ini"; |
| 2706 | } |
| 2707 | else { |
| 2708 | --- 22,28 ---- |
| 2709 | $rcfile=".perldb"; |
| 2710 | } |
| 2711 | elsif (-e "con") { |
| 2712 | ! $console = ""; |
| 2713 | $rcfile="perldb.ini"; |
| 2714 | } |
| 2715 | else { |
| 2716 | |
| 2717 | *** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs. |
| 2718 | |
| 2719 | This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95. |
| 2720 | You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6. |
| 2721 | |
| 2722 | *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly. |
| 2723 | |
| 2724 | This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems |
| 2725 | when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited |
| 2726 | cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the Emacs on MS |
| 2727 | Windows FAQ (info manual "efaq-w32"). |
| 2728 | |
| 2729 | *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs. |
| 2730 | |
| 2731 | When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH, |
| 2732 | Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In |
| 2733 | particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java |
| 2734 | program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system PATH. |
| 2735 | |
| 2736 | ** MS-DOS |
| 2737 | |
| 2738 | *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT or later, "config msdos" fails. |
| 2739 | |
| 2740 | If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because |
| 2741 | Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a |
| 2742 | program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by |
| 2743 | config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to |
| 2744 | the front of your PATH environment variable. |
| 2745 | |
| 2746 | *** When Emacs compiled with DJGPP runs on Windows 2000 and later, it cannot |
| 2747 | find your HOME directory. |
| 2748 | |
| 2749 | This was reported to happen when you click on "Save for future |
| 2750 | sessions" button in a Customize buffer. You might see an error |
| 2751 | message like this one: |
| 2752 | |
| 2753 | basic-save-buffer-2: c:/FOO/BAR/~dosuser/: no such directory |
| 2754 | |
| 2755 | (The telltale sign is the "~USER" part at the end of the directory |
| 2756 | Emacs complains about, where USER is your username or the literal |
| 2757 | string "dosuser", which is the default username set up by the DJGPP |
| 2758 | startup file DJGPP.ENV.) |
| 2759 | |
| 2760 | This happens when the functions `user-login-name' and |
| 2761 | `user-real-login-name' return different strings for your username as |
| 2762 | Emacs sees it. To correct this, make sure both USER and USERNAME |
| 2763 | environment variables are set to the same value. Windows 2000 and |
| 2764 | later sets USERNAME, so if you want to keep that, make sure USER is |
| 2765 | set to the same value. If you don't want to set USER globally, you |
| 2766 | can do it in the [emacs] section of your DJGPP.ENV file. |
| 2767 | |
| 2768 | *** When Emacs compiled with DJGPP runs on Vista, it runs out of memory. |
| 2769 | |
| 2770 | If Emacs running on Vista displays "!MEM FULL!" in the mode line, you |
| 2771 | are hitting the memory allocation bugs in the Vista DPMI server. See |
| 2772 | msdos/INSTALL for how to work around these bugs (search for "Vista"). |
| 2773 | |
| 2774 | *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets |
| 2775 | like make-docfile. |
| 2776 | |
| 2777 | This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment |
| 2778 | variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during |
| 2779 | compilation are not the same. See msdos/INSTALL for the explanation |
| 2780 | of how to avoid this problem. |
| 2781 | |
| 2782 | *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup: |
| 2783 | |
| 2784 | "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face" |
| 2785 | |
| 2786 | This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs |
| 2787 | on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the |
| 2788 | value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then |
| 2789 | works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't |
| 2790 | support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be |
| 2791 | undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an |
| 2792 | [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for |
| 2793 | `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of |
| 2794 | your system works as before. |
| 2795 | |
| 2796 | *** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup. |
| 2797 | |
| 2798 | Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management, |
| 2799 | and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't |
| 2800 | know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real |
| 2801 | memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler. |
| 2802 | However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround. |
| 2803 | |
| 2804 | You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without |
| 2805 | arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more |
| 2806 | information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp |
| 2807 | is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.) |
| 2808 | |
| 2809 | Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory |
| 2810 | configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider |
| 2811 | removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches) |
| 2812 | and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See |
| 2813 | the djgpp faq for configuration hints. |
| 2814 | |
| 2815 | *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files |
| 2816 | in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any |
| 2817 | drive, e.g. `c:/dev'. |
| 2818 | |
| 2819 | This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style |
| 2820 | device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A |
| 2821 | work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name. |
| 2822 | |
| 2823 | *** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOS if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs. |
| 2824 | |
| 2825 | There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems: |
| 2826 | |
| 2827 | * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get |
| 2828 | `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com'; |
| 2829 | * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs. |
| 2830 | |
| 2831 | To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos |
| 2832 | subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link |
| 2833 | them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the |
| 2834 | incorrect library functions. |
| 2835 | |
| 2836 | *** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other |
| 2837 | run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled. |
| 2838 | |
| 2839 | Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits |
| 2840 | immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find |
| 2841 | the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout |
| 2842 | and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs. |
| 2843 | |
| 2844 | Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load |
| 2845 | the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and Lisp. |
| 2846 | |
| 2847 | This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN |
| 2848 | support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6 |
| 2849 | characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it. |
| 2850 | You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long |
| 2851 | filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program |
| 2852 | compiled with DJGPP v2). The file msdos/INSTALL explains this issue |
| 2853 | in more detail. |
| 2854 | |
| 2855 | Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for |
| 2856 | MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported |
| 2857 | by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an |
| 2858 | unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating |
| 2859 | them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs |
| 2860 | must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are |
| 2861 | properly truncated. |
| 2862 | |
| 2863 | ** Archaic window managers and toolkits |
| 2864 | |
| 2865 | *** Open Look: Under Open Look, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q. |
| 2866 | |
| 2867 | Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit |
| 2868 | command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use |
| 2869 | Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window |
| 2870 | manager to use some other command. You can disable the |
| 2871 | shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults: |
| 2872 | |
| 2873 | OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False |
| 2874 | |
| 2875 | *** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm. |
| 2876 | |
| 2877 | twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions. |
| 2878 | You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file: |
| 2879 | |
| 2880 | UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position |
| 2881 | |
| 2882 | ** Bugs related to old DEC hardware |
| 2883 | |
| 2884 | *** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key. |
| 2885 | |
| 2886 | This shell command should fix it: |
| 2887 | |
| 2888 | xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L' |
| 2889 | |
| 2890 | *** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver |
| 2891 | as a concentrator. |
| 2892 | |
| 2893 | This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use |
| 2894 | 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters. |
| 2895 | \f |
| 2896 | This file is part of GNU Emacs. |
| 2897 | |
| 2898 | GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify |
| 2899 | it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by |
| 2900 | the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or |
| 2901 | (at your option) any later version. |
| 2902 | |
| 2903 | GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, |
| 2904 | but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of |
| 2905 | MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the |
| 2906 | GNU General Public License for more details. |
| 2907 | |
| 2908 | You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License |
| 2909 | along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>. |
| 2910 | |
| 2911 | \f |
| 2912 | Local variables: |
| 2913 | mode: outline |
| 2914 | paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$" |
| 2915 | end: |