1 Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
2 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
3 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 See the end of the file for license conditions.
7 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
8 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
9 and browsing through the outline headers.
11 * Mule-UCS doesn't work in Emacs 23.
13 It's completely redundant now, as far as we know.
15 * Emacs startup failures
17 ** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
19 A typical error message might be something like
21 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
23 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
24 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
27 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
29 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
30 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
31 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
33 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
34 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
35 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
37 ** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
39 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
40 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
41 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
42 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
43 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
44 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
45 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
46 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
49 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
50 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
51 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
52 same directory where system header files are kept.
54 ** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
56 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
57 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
58 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
59 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
60 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
61 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
63 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
64 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
65 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
66 it constitutes a separate package.
68 ** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
70 The typical error message might be like this:
72 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
74 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
75 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
76 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
77 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
78 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
79 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
80 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
82 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
83 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
85 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
88 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
89 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
90 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
92 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
94 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
95 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
98 ** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
100 An example of such an error is:
102 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
104 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
105 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
106 present in load-path:
108 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
110 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
111 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
114 ** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
116 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
118 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
119 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
121 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
122 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
123 /******************************************************************
125 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
132 + char* begin = NULL;
136 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
139 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
141 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
142 + if (begin != NULL) {
143 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
147 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
153 ** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
155 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
156 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
157 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
158 happens to exist on your X server).
160 ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
162 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
163 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
164 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
166 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
167 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
169 ** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
170 a segmentation fault and core dump.
172 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
173 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
175 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
177 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
180 ** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
181 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
182 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
183 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
186 ** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
188 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
189 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
190 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
191 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
192 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
194 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
195 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
198 ** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
200 If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
201 reported to prevent the crashes.
203 ** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
205 It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
207 This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
208 the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
209 flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
210 necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
212 On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
213 configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
215 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes when closing a display (x-close-connection).
217 This happens because of bugs in Gtk+. Gtk+ 2.10 seems to be OK. See bug
218 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
220 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes on startup on cygwin.
222 A typical error message is
223 ***MEMORY-ERROR***: emacs[5172]: GSlice: failed to allocate 504 bytes
224 (alignment: 512): Function not implemented
226 Emacs supplies its own malloc, but glib (part of Gtk+) calls memalign and on
227 cygwin that becomes the cygwin supplied memalign. As malloc is not the
228 cygwin malloc, the cygwin memalign always returns ENOSYS. A fix for this
229 problem would be welcome.
231 * General runtime problems
235 *** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
237 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
238 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
239 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
240 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
242 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
243 than the corresponding .el file.
245 *** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
247 These control the actions of Emacs.
248 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
249 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
252 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
253 of them, then try again.
255 *** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
257 The error message might be something like this:
259 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
261 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
262 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
263 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
266 *** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
268 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
269 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
270 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
272 *** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
273 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
274 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
275 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
279 *** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
281 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
282 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
283 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
284 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
285 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
286 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
288 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
289 them to two different keys.
291 *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
293 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
294 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
295 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
297 *** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
298 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
300 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
301 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
302 another escape character in kermit. One user did
304 set escape-character 17
306 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
308 ** Mailers and other helper programs
310 *** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
312 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
313 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
314 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
315 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
316 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
319 *** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
321 RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
322 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
323 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
325 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
326 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
327 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
328 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
329 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
330 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
331 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
333 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
334 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
335 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
336 `mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
341 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
342 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
343 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
344 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
350 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
351 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
352 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
353 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
354 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
355 directory copy is ineffective.
357 *** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
359 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
360 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
362 ** Problems with hostname resolution
364 *** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
365 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
366 *** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
367 *** Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
369 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
370 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
371 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
372 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
374 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
375 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
377 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
378 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
380 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
382 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
383 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
384 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
385 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
386 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
387 be careful not to lose the others.
389 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
391 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
393 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
394 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
397 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
399 *** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
401 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
402 either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
403 calls for specifying this.
405 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
406 mail-host-address to the value you want.
410 *** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
413 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
414 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
415 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
416 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
417 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
418 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
420 *** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
421 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
422 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
425 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
426 call in the RFS server.
428 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
429 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
430 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
431 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
433 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
435 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
436 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
437 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
438 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
439 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
440 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
441 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
443 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
445 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
446 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
447 retrieving revision 1.2
448 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
449 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
450 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
454 * No return sent for close or fsync!
456 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
457 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
462 * No return sent for close or fsync!
464 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
465 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
471 *** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
472 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
473 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
475 *** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
477 PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
478 as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
479 of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
480 sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
481 HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
482 (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
483 (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
485 *** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
486 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
487 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
490 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
491 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
492 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
493 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
495 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
496 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
497 + (insert-file-contents entity)
498 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
499 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
500 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
504 You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
507 *** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
509 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
512 *** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
514 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
515 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
519 *** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit.
521 When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examined
522 directory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous message
523 from which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committed
524 files. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer are
525 not updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines are
526 added to the top-level directory.
528 This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS
529 1.12.10 or newer to fix this problem.
531 ** Miscellaneous problems
533 *** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
535 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
536 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
537 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
539 *** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
542 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
543 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
544 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
547 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
548 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
549 it only if it is undefined.
551 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
553 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
554 happen in a non-login shell.
556 *** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
558 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
559 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
560 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
561 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
564 if ("$EMACS" =~ /*) then
566 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
570 *** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
572 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
573 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
574 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
577 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
579 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
581 *** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
583 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
584 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
585 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
586 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
587 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
588 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
590 update-alternatives --config ftp
592 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
594 *** JPEG images aren't displayed.
596 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
597 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
598 correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
599 against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
601 *** Dired is very slow.
603 This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
604 time. Possible reasons for this include:
606 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
607 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
609 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
611 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
613 To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
614 `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
615 invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
616 (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
618 *** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
619 under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
621 *** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
623 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
624 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
625 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
626 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
628 *** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
630 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
631 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
632 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
634 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
636 *** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
637 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
638 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
639 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
640 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
642 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
643 process invokes Emacs several times.
645 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
646 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
649 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
650 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
651 specified run-time search path in the executable.
653 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
654 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
655 backtraces like this:
658 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]
659 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
660 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
661 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
662 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
663 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
664 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
665 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
666 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
668 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
669 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
670 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
671 to work around the problem.
673 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
675 *** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
676 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
678 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
679 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
680 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
682 *** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
684 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
685 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
686 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
687 support for 8-bit characters.
689 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
690 this at your shell's prompt:
694 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
695 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
698 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
699 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
700 Then rebuild the speller.
702 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
703 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
705 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
706 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
707 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
708 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
709 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
711 If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
712 you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
713 can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
714 in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
716 * Runtime problems related to font handling
718 ** Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
720 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
721 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
722 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
724 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
725 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
726 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
728 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
729 display all the characters Emacs supports. The etl-unicode collection
730 of fonts (available from <URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/fonts/> and
731 <URL:ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/mirror/X.Org/contrib/fonts/>) includes
732 fonts that can display many Unicode characters; they can also be used
733 by ps-print and ps-mule to print Unicode characters.
735 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
736 missing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur for
737 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
738 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
739 of this character to display a space.
741 ** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
743 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution
744 or the etl-unicode collection (see the previous entry).
746 ** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
748 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
749 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
750 lines do not overlap.
752 ** Loading fonts is very slow.
754 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
755 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
756 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
759 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
760 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
762 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
763 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
764 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
766 ** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
768 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
769 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
770 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
771 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
772 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
773 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
774 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
775 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
776 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
777 to the end of a very large buffer.
779 Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
780 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
781 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
782 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
784 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
785 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
786 fontification by setting the variable
787 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
788 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
790 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
791 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
793 ** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
794 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
796 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
797 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
798 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
800 ** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
802 This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
803 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
804 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
805 the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
806 fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
807 Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
808 and then start the application again.
809 If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
810 application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
811 of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
812 sufficient to recompile Qt.
814 ** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
816 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
817 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
818 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
819 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
821 A workaround for this is to add something like
823 emacs.waitForWM: false
825 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
826 frame's parameter list, like this:
828 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
830 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
832 ** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
834 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
835 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
836 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
837 problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
840 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
841 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
844 ** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
846 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
847 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
848 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
849 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
850 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
852 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
853 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
855 * Internationalization problems
857 ** M-{ does not work on a Spanish PC keyboard.
859 Many Spanish keyboards seem to ignore that combination. Emacs can't
860 do anything about it.
862 ** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
864 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
865 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
866 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
867 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
868 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
869 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
870 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
871 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
872 include in the fontset spec:
874 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
875 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
876 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
878 ** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
880 Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in the
881 ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts of
882 CJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets:
884 GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601
886 The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on by
887 default). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacs
888 charset is decided by the current language environment. For instance,
889 in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312.
891 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
892 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
893 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
894 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
895 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
896 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
899 ** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
901 Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
902 library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
903 following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
904 though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
905 distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
907 --- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
908 +++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
909 @@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
915 - (mucs-define-coding-system
916 - (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
917 - (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
918 - (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
920 + (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
921 + ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
922 + ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
923 + ;; system definitions.
924 + (let ((y (cadr x)))
925 + (mucs-define-coding-system
926 + (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
927 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
930 + (mucs-define-coding-system
931 + (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
932 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
933 + (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
937 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
939 Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
940 Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
942 ** Mule-UCS compilation problem.
944 Emacs of old versions and XEmacs byte-compile the form `(progn progn
945 ...)' the same way as `(progn ...)', but Emacs of version 21.3 and the
946 later process that form just as interpreter does, that is, as `progn'
947 variable reference. Apply the following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 to
948 make it compiled by the latest Emacs.
950 --- mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 00:42:23 -0000 1.1.1.1
951 +++ mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 01:31:51 -0000 1.3
952 @@ -639,10 +639,14 @@
953 (mucs-notify-embedment 'mucs-ccl-required name)
954 (setq ccl-pgm-list (cdr ccl-pgm-list)))
955 ; (message "MCCLREGFIN:%S" result)
957 - (setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
958 - (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
960 + ;; The only way the function is used in this package is included
961 + ;; in `mucs-package-definition-end-hook' value, where it must
962 + ;; return (possibly empty) *list* of forms. Do this. Do not rely
963 + ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)'
965 + `((setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
966 + (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
969 ;;; Add hook for embedding translation informations to a package.
970 (add-hook 'mucs-package-definition-end-hook
972 ** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
974 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
975 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
976 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
977 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
978 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
979 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
981 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
983 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
985 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
988 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
989 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
992 ** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
994 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
995 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
996 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
997 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
998 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
1000 ** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1002 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1003 (standard-display-european t)
1004 That should be changed to
1005 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1007 * X runtime problems
1009 ** X keyboard problems
1011 *** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
1013 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
1014 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
1015 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
1016 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
1018 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
1020 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
1022 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
1023 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
1024 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
1026 *** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
1028 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
1030 *** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method).
1032 Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program
1033 which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users
1034 from using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'.
1036 One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' file
1037 which can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory.
1038 However, that requires root access.
1040 Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources.
1042 Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.
1044 The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx
1045 (Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. If
1046 you want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitx
1047 by another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or be
1048 accustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'.
1050 *** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1052 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1053 for character composition.
1055 *** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1057 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1058 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1059 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1060 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1063 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1064 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1066 *** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1068 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1069 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1070 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1071 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1074 *** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
1076 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
1077 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
1078 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
1080 *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
1081 directly with an X server.
1083 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
1084 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
1085 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
1086 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
1087 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
1088 have made the key binding correctly.
1090 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
1091 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
1092 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
1095 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
1097 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
1098 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
1100 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1101 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1102 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1103 modifier bit not otherwise used.
1105 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1106 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1107 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1108 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
1110 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1111 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
1113 ** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
1115 *** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM.
1117 This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later
1118 is running. If gnome-settings-daemon is not running, Emacs receives
1119 input through XIM without any problem. Furthermore, this seems only
1120 to happen in *.UTF-8 locales; zh_CN.GB2312 and zh_CN.GBK locales, for
1121 example, work fine. A bug report has been filed in the Gnome
1122 bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357032
1124 *** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
1126 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1127 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1128 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1129 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1132 *** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1135 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1136 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1139 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1140 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1141 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1142 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1143 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1145 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1146 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1147 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1148 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1149 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1150 present or commented out:
1152 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1153 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1157 *** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1159 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1160 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1161 of klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections,
1162 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1163 while, Emacs may print a message:
1165 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1167 A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
1168 comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
1170 *** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1172 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1173 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1174 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1175 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1177 *** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1178 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1179 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1182 *** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1183 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1184 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1185 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1186 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1187 used with neXtaw at run time.
1189 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1190 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1193 *** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
1195 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1196 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1197 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1198 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
1200 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1201 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
1203 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1204 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1205 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
1207 *** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
1209 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1210 emulation for which it is set up.
1212 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
1213 Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
1214 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1215 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1216 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1217 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1220 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1221 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1222 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1225 *** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1227 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1229 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1231 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1232 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1233 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1234 the resource prevents the problem.
1236 ** General X problems
1238 *** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1240 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1241 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1242 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1243 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1245 Here's how to do this:
1247 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1249 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1250 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1253 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1255 *** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
1257 The messages might say something like this:
1259 Unable to load color "grey95"
1261 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
1263 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
1265 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1266 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1267 resources to load all the colors it needs.
1269 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
1271 "undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the
1272 X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where
1273 X expects to find it.
1275 *** Improving performance with slow X connections.
1277 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1278 be carried out at the same time:
1280 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1281 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1282 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1283 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1286 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
1287 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the
1288 following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only
1289 after the the initial frame is displayed:
1291 (scroll-bar-mode -1)
1295 For still quicker startup, put these X resources in your .Xdefaults
1298 Emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
1302 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1303 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
1305 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1306 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1307 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1308 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1309 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
1310 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate
1311 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1312 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1313 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1314 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1315 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
1317 5) If copying and killing is slow, try to disable the interaction with the
1318 native system's clipboard by adding these lines to your .emacs file:
1319 (setq interprogram-cut-function nil)
1320 (setq interprogram-paste-function nil)
1322 *** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1324 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1325 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1328 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1330 *** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1332 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1333 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1335 *** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
1337 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1338 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1339 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1342 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1343 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1344 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1345 workaround can be found.
1347 *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1348 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
1350 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1352 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1353 that isn't a color.)
1355 The fix is to correct your X resources.
1357 *** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
1359 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1360 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1361 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1364 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1365 your font path, like this:
1367 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
1369 *** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
1371 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
1373 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
1375 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1376 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1377 want, rewrite the resource.
1379 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1380 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1381 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
1383 *** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1384 *** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
1386 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1387 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1390 *** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
1392 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1393 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1394 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
1396 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1397 whether this problem is present on a given system.
1399 *** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
1401 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1402 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1403 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1404 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
1406 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1407 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1408 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
1410 The easy way to do this is to put
1412 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
1414 in your site-init.el file.
1416 * Runtime problems on character termunals
1418 ** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
1420 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1421 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1422 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1423 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1424 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1425 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1426 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1427 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
1429 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
1431 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1432 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1433 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
1435 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1436 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1437 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
1438 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1439 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1440 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
1442 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1443 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1444 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1445 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1446 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1447 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1448 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1449 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1450 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
1452 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1453 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1454 codes. You might as well try it.
1456 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1457 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1458 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1459 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1460 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1461 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1462 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1463 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
1465 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1466 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1467 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1468 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1469 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1472 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1473 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1474 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1475 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1476 other control characters are already used by emacs.
1478 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1479 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1482 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1483 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1484 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1485 automatically. Here is an example:
1487 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1489 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1490 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1493 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1494 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1495 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1496 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1497 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1498 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1499 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1500 of inferior systems.
1502 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
1504 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1505 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1506 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1507 that wants to use flow control.
1509 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1510 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1511 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
1513 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1514 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1515 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
1517 ** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
1519 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1520 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1521 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
1523 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1524 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1525 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1526 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1527 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1528 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1529 There are several possibilities:
1531 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
1533 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1534 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
1536 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1537 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1540 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1541 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1542 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1543 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1544 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1545 tested on many kinds of terminals.
1547 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
1549 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1550 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1551 for certain terminals.
1553 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1554 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
1556 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1557 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
1559 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
1561 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1562 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1563 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1564 control on the local system.
1566 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1567 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1568 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1569 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
1571 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1572 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1573 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
1575 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1576 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1577 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1578 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
1580 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1582 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1585 ** Output from Control-V is slow.
1587 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1588 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1589 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1590 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1591 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1592 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
1594 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1595 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1596 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1597 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1598 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1599 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1600 time as the operations really take.
1602 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1603 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1604 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1605 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1606 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1607 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1608 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1609 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1610 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1611 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
1613 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1614 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1615 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1616 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1617 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1618 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1621 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1622 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1623 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
1625 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1626 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
1628 ** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
1630 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1633 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1634 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1635 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1636 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1637 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1640 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1641 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1642 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1643 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1644 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1645 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
1647 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1648 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1649 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1650 You can probably access help-command via f1.
1652 ** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
1654 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1655 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1656 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1657 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1658 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1659 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1660 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1663 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1664 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1665 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1666 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1667 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1668 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1669 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1672 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1673 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1674 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1675 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
1677 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1678 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1679 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1680 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1683 Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line
1684 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1685 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1686 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
1688 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1689 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1690 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1691 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1692 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1693 `global-font-lock-mode'.
1695 * Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
1699 *** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted.
1701 There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs to
1702 read corrupted process output.
1704 *** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption.
1706 If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupted
1707 due to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc.
1709 To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it
1710 executable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name of
1714 exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
1717 *** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1718 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1720 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1721 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1724 *** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1725 the Meta key stops working.
1727 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1728 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1729 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1730 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1731 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1732 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1733 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1735 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1736 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1737 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1738 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1739 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1742 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1744 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1745 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1747 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1749 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1750 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1751 keys can serve as Meta.
1753 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1754 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1756 *** GNU/Linux: slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1758 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1759 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1761 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1762 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1763 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1764 networked and non-networked machines.
1766 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1768 **** Networked Case.
1770 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1771 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1772 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1776 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1782 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1783 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1784 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1785 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1787 **** Non-Networked Case.
1789 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1790 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1791 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1792 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1793 file is not necessary with this approach.
1795 *** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
1797 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1798 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1799 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1800 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1801 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1802 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1803 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1806 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1807 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1808 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1809 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1810 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1811 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
1813 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1814 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1815 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1816 produce a modified terminfo entry.
1818 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1819 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
1821 *** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1823 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1824 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1825 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1826 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1828 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1832 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Environment Variables from dotfiles are ignored.
1834 When starting Emacs from the Dock or the Finder on Mac OS X, the
1835 environment variables that are set up in dotfiles, such as .cshrc or
1836 .profile, are ignored. This is because the Finder and Dock are not
1837 started from a shell, but instead from the Window Manager itself.
1839 The workaround for this is to create a .MacOSX/environment.plist file to
1840 setup these environment variables. These environment variables will
1841 apply to all processes regardless of where they are started.
1842 For me information, see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html.
1844 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Process output truncated when using ptys.
1846 There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
1847 Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
1848 leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
1850 *** Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Carbon): QuickTime 7.0.4 updater breaks build.
1852 On the above environment, build fails at the link stage with the
1853 message like "Undefined symbols: _HICopyAccessibilityActionDescription
1854 referenced from QuickTime expected to be defined in Carbon". A
1855 workaround is to use QuickTime 7.0.1 reinstaller.
1859 *** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1860 directories that have the +t bit.
1862 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1863 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1864 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1865 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1867 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1868 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1870 *** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
1872 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1873 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1874 current keymap to a file with the command
1876 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
1878 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1879 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1880 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1883 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
1885 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
1887 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
1891 *** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
1893 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
1895 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1896 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1897 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1898 but tty is giving it back 3.
1900 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1903 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
1905 should be changed to:
1907 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
1909 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1912 *** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
1914 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1915 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1916 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1917 value is just ten seconds.
1919 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
1921 *** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1922 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1924 This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1925 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1926 configures the X server.
1928 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1929 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1930 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1935 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1937 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1938 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1941 *** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1942 Emacs built with Motif.
1944 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1945 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1947 *** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
1949 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1950 rights, containing this text:
1952 --------------------------------
1953 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1954 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1955 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1960 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1962 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1963 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1965 --------------------------------
1967 *** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
1969 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1973 *** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
1975 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
1976 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
1978 *** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
1980 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
1982 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
1983 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
1985 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
1987 *** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
1988 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
1989 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
1990 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
1992 *** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
1994 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
1995 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
1996 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
1997 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
1999 *** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
2000 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
2002 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
2003 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
2004 Definitions" to make them defined.
2008 We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
2009 section on legacy systems.
2011 *** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2013 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2014 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2016 *** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2018 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2019 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2020 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2021 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2023 *** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
2025 We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
2026 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
2027 makes the problem stop:
2029 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
2030 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
2031 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
2032 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
2034 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
2035 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
2037 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
2038 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
2039 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
2041 *** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
2043 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
2044 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
2046 *** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
2047 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
2049 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
2051 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
2053 *** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
2054 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
2056 You can fix this by editing the file:
2058 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
2060 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
2062 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2066 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2068 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
2072 *** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
2074 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
2076 *** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
2078 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2079 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2080 to allocate ptys reliably.
2082 * Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
2084 ** Windows 95 and networking.
2086 To support server sockets, Emacs 22.1 loads ws2_32.dll. If this file
2087 is missing, all Emacs networking features are disabled.
2089 Old versions of Windows 95 may not have the required DLL. To use
2090 Emacs' networking features on Windows 95, you must install the
2091 "Windows Socket 2" update available from MicroSoft's support Web.
2093 ** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
2095 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
2096 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
2099 ** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 22.1
2101 Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameter
2102 with a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems.
2103 Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control over
2104 which font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character,
2105 use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset.
2107 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
2108 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
2109 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
2110 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
2111 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
2112 pop-up menu interaction.
2114 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
2115 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
2117 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
2118 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
2119 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
2120 after moving back into it.
2122 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
2123 not as severely as in 21.1.
2125 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
2126 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
2128 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. Some
2129 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
2130 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
2131 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
2132 work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
2133 you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
2134 the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
2135 ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
2136 appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
2139 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
2140 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
2141 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
2144 ** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
2146 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
2147 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
2148 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
2149 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
2150 or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
2152 ** Cygwin build of Emacs hangs after rebasing Cygwin DLLs
2154 Usually, on Cygwin, one needs to rebase the DLLs if an application
2155 aborts with a message like this:
2157 C:\cygwin\bin\python.exe: *** unable to remap C:\cygwin\bin\cygssl.dll to
2158 same address as parent(0xDF0000) != 0xE00000
2160 However, since Cygwin DLL 1.5.17 was released, after such rebasing,
2163 This was reported to happen for Emacs 21.2 and also for the pretest of
2164 Emacs 22.1 on Cygwin.
2166 To work around this, build Emacs like this:
2168 LDFLAGS='-Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base' ./configure
2170 make LD='$(CC)' install
2172 This produces an Emacs binary that is independent of rebasing.
2174 Note that you _must_ use LD='$(CC)' in the last two commands above, to
2175 prevent GCC from passing the "--image-base 0x20000000" option to the
2176 linker, which is what it does by default. That option produces an
2177 Emacs binary with the base address 0x20000000, which will cause Emacs
2178 to hang after Cygwin DLLs are rebased.
2180 ** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
2182 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
2183 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
2184 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
2185 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
2186 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
2188 ** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2190 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
2191 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
2192 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
2193 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
2194 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
2197 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2198 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2199 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2200 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2201 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2202 client's executable. For example:
2204 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
2206 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2207 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
2209 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
2211 ** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
2213 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2214 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
2216 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2217 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2218 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2219 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2222 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2223 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2224 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2225 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
2227 ** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2229 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2230 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2231 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2232 work when an antivirus package is installed.
2234 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2235 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2236 or disable it entirely.
2238 ** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
2240 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2241 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2242 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2243 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2244 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2245 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2246 generic mouse driver might help.
2248 ** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
2250 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2251 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2252 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2253 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
2255 ** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2256 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2257 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2260 ** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2261 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
2263 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
2265 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2266 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2267 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2268 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2269 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2270 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
2272 ** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
2274 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2275 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2276 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2277 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
2279 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2280 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2281 problem lies in the X-server settings.
2283 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2284 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2285 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2288 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2289 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2290 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2293 * Build-time problems
2297 *** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
2299 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2300 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2301 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
2303 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2304 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2305 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2306 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2307 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2308 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
2312 *** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
2314 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
2315 (RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
2316 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2317 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2318 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2319 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2320 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2321 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
2323 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2324 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2325 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2326 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
2328 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2329 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2330 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2331 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2332 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2333 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2334 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2335 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2338 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2339 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2340 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2341 to work around the problem.
2343 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2344 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2345 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2346 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
2348 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
2350 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
2352 *** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
2354 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2355 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2356 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2357 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2358 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2359 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2360 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2361 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2364 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2365 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2366 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2367 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2368 run the script like this:
2370 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
2372 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2375 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2376 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
2378 *** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2379 *** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2381 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2382 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2383 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2386 *** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2388 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2389 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2390 Emacs's configure script.
2392 *** Building a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit GNU/Linux architecture.
2394 First ensure that the necessary 32-bit system libraries and include
2395 files are installed. Then use:
2397 env CC="gcc -m32" ./configure --build=i386-linux-gnu \
2398 --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
2400 (using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system).
2402 *** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC version
2404 Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
2405 reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time. In
2406 addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
2407 info. Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
2408 compiling Emacs. GCC versions 4.0.3 and 4.1.1 reportedly build a
2409 working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend these GCC versions.
2411 *** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
2413 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2414 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2415 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2416 __MSVCRT__, like so:
2418 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
2420 *** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
2422 Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2423 to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2424 fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
2426 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
2428 The error message might be something like this:
2430 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
2431 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
2432 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
2436 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
2437 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
2438 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
2439 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
2442 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
2443 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
2444 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
2445 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
2448 *** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
2450 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2451 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2452 patch to assert.h should solve this:
2454 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2455 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2459 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2461 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
2463 #else /* debugging enabled */
2467 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2469 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
2471 #else /* debugging enabled */
2476 *** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2477 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
2479 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2480 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2481 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2482 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2483 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2486 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
2490 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2491 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
2493 *** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
2495 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2496 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2500 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2501 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2503 *** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2504 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2505 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2507 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2508 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2511 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2515 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2518 *** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2520 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2522 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2524 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2526 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2527 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2529 *** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2531 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2533 *** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
2535 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2536 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2537 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2538 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2539 does not work with this version of ncurses.
2541 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
2545 *** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
2547 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Redhat Fedora Core
2548 1 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
2549 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs tries
2550 to handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, these
2551 instructions can be useful.
2552 The work-around explained here is not enough on Fedora Core 4 (and possible
2553 newer). Read the next item.
2555 Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
2556 x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
2557 workaround is known.
2559 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
2561 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2563 It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
2564 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
2565 associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
2567 echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2569 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2570 execution of this command:
2572 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2574 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
2575 Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
2576 command when running temacs like this:
2578 setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2581 *** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.
2583 In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during
2584 `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel"
2585 item, Linux kernel shipped with Fedora Core 4 randomizes the virtual
2586 address space of a process. As the result dumping may fail even if
2587 you turn off exec-shield. In this case, use the -R option to the setarch
2590 setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2594 setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
2596 *** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
2598 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2599 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2601 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2602 space available on the machine.
2604 On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2605 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2606 for large blocks (many pages).
2608 *** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2609 *** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2610 *** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2611 *** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
2613 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2614 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2615 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2617 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2618 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2619 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2620 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2621 when unpacking the shell archive.
2623 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2624 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2625 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2627 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2628 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2630 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2631 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2632 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2633 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2634 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2635 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2636 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2637 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2638 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2639 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2640 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2642 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2644 *** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
2646 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2647 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2648 space than was allocated.
2650 This could be caused by
2651 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2652 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2653 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2654 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2655 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2656 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2658 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2659 (not from the directory you expected).
2660 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2661 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2662 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2663 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2666 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2667 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2669 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2670 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2673 *** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
2675 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2676 C backtrace printed by GDB:
2678 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2680 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2681 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2682 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2683 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
2685 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2686 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2687 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2688 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2689 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2690 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2691 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2694 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2695 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2696 know what's really going on here. */
2697 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2699 #if defined __linux__
2700 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2701 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2706 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2707 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2712 *** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
2714 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2715 supplies the `install-info' command.
2719 *** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
2721 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2722 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2723 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2724 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
2726 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
2728 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2729 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
2731 *** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2733 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2735 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2736 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2737 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2738 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2740 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2741 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2742 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2743 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2744 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2748 ** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
2750 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2751 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2752 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2753 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2755 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2757 * Runtime problems on legacy systems
2759 This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2760 If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2761 it is unlikely you will see any of these.
2763 ** Ancient operating systems
2765 AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2767 *** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2769 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2770 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2772 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2773 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2774 X11Dev... with smit.
2776 (This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2778 *** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2780 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2781 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2782 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2783 treated as control characters.
2785 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2786 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2788 *** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2790 Could not load program emacs
2791 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2792 Error was: Exec format error
2796 Could not load program .emacs
2797 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2798 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2799 Error was: Exec format error
2801 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2802 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2804 *** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
2806 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
2807 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
2811 **** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2813 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2814 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2815 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2816 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2817 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2819 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2820 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2822 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2826 SunOS 4.1.4 stopped shipping on Sep 30 1998.
2828 **** SunOS: You get linker errors
2829 ld: Undefined symbol
2830 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
2831 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
2833 **** Sun 4.0.x: M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2835 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2836 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2838 **** SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3: Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2840 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2841 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2842 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2843 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2844 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2845 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2846 obtain the destination address.
2848 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2849 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2850 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
2851 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
2852 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2853 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2854 of this writing, these official versions are available:
2856 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2857 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2858 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2859 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2860 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2862 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2863 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2865 **** Sunos 4: You get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2867 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2868 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2869 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2871 **** SunOS 4.1.3: Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
2873 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
2874 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
2875 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
2876 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
2878 **** Sunos 4.1.3: Emacs gets hung shortly after startup.
2880 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2881 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2883 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2884 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2885 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2886 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2887 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2889 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2890 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2892 **** SunOS 4: Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
2893 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
2895 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
2897 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
2898 or link libXmu statically.
2900 **** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
2902 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2903 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2904 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2905 communicating through pipes.
2909 **** Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain.
2911 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2913 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2915 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2916 Here is how to make more of them.
2920 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2922 # creates eight new pty's
2926 *** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
2928 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
2931 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
2933 *** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
2934 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
2936 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
2938 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
2939 003082 August 11, 1998.
2943 **** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
2945 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
2948 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
2950 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
2951 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
2952 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
2954 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
2956 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
2957 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
2959 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
2960 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
2964 **** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
2966 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
2967 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
2970 **** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
2972 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
2973 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
2974 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
2976 **** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
2978 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
2979 version of Solaris that you are using.
2981 **** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
2983 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
2984 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
2986 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
2988 **** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
2990 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
2991 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
2992 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
2993 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
2994 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
2996 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
2997 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
2998 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
3001 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
3002 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
3003 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
3005 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
3006 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
3008 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
3009 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
3011 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
3014 **** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
3015 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
3017 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
3018 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
3021 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3026 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
3028 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3032 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
3033 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
3034 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
3035 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
3036 definition for your type of machine and system.
3038 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
3039 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
3040 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
3042 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
3043 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
3044 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
3047 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
3049 #define ThreadedX YES
3051 #define ThreadedX NO
3052 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
3053 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
3054 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
3056 **** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
3058 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
3059 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
3060 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
3061 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
3062 described in the Solaris FAQ
3063 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
3064 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
3066 **** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
3067 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
3068 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
3069 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
3070 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
3071 and the default CFLAGS.
3073 **** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
3075 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
3076 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
3077 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
3078 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
3079 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
3080 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
3081 are currently recommended for your host.
3083 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
3084 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
3085 105284-18 might fix it again.
3087 **** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
3089 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
3090 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
3091 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
3092 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
3094 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
3095 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
3096 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
3097 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
3100 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
3101 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
3104 *** HP/UX versions before 11.0
3106 HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
3107 HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
3109 **** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
3111 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
3112 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
3115 *** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
3117 See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
3119 *** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
3121 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
3122 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
3123 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
3124 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
3125 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
3126 install them and rebuild Emacs.
3128 *** Ultrix and Digital Unix
3130 **** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
3132 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
3133 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
3134 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
3137 **** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
3139 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
3140 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
3141 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
3142 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
3145 **** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
3147 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
3148 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
3149 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
3150 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
3152 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
3153 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
3155 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
3156 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
3157 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
3158 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
3162 **** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
3164 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
3165 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
3166 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
3168 **** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
3170 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
3171 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
3172 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
3174 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
3175 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
3176 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
3177 configure script) that reads:
3178 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
3179 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
3182 *** Irix 5 and earlier
3184 Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
3185 shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
3187 **** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
3189 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
3190 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
3191 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
3192 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
3195 **** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
3197 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
3198 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
3199 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
3200 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
3203 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
3206 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
3208 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
3209 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
3210 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
3211 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
3214 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
3215 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
3216 on the network that can log on to the host.
3218 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
3219 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
3220 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
3223 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
3224 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
3225 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
3226 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
3228 **** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
3230 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
3231 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
3233 **** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
3235 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
3236 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
3237 find that string, and take out the spaces.
3239 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
3241 *** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3243 **** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3245 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3246 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3247 fonts, so it does not work.
3249 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3250 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3251 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3252 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3253 resources affect Emacs also:
3255 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3256 *Background: scoBackground
3257 *Foreground: scoForeground
3259 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3260 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3262 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3263 Emacs*Background: white
3264 Emacs*Foreground: black
3266 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3267 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3268 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3269 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3270 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3271 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3272 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3273 Open Desktop display.
3275 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3276 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3278 **** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3280 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3281 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3282 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3283 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3286 **** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3288 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3289 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3290 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3291 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3292 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3293 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3295 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3296 But you have to be root to do it.
3298 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3300 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3301 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3302 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3303 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3304 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3306 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3307 These changes take effect when you reboot.
3311 **** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
3313 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3314 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3315 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
3317 **** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3318 truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
3320 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
3323 ** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3325 *** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3327 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3328 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3330 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3331 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3334 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3335 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3336 communicate with the subprocess.
3338 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3339 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3340 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3343 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3347 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3348 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3355 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3363 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3368 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3369 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3376 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3384 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3388 *** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3390 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3391 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3393 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3395 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3396 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3397 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3398 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3400 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3402 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3403 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3404 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3405 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3410 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
3412 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3413 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3414 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3415 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3416 the front of your PATH environment variable.
3418 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3421 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3422 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3423 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
3424 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
3426 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
3428 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
3430 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3431 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3432 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3433 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3434 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3435 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3436 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3437 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3438 your system works as before.
3440 *** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
3442 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3443 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3444 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3445 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3446 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
3448 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3449 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3450 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3451 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
3453 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3454 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3455 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3456 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3457 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
3459 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3460 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3461 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
3463 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3464 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3465 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
3467 *** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
3469 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
3471 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3472 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3473 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
3475 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3476 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3477 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3478 incorrect library functions.
3480 *** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3481 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
3483 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3484 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3485 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3486 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
3488 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3489 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3492 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3493 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3494 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3495 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3496 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3497 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
3498 explains this issue in more detail.
3500 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3501 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3502 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3503 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3504 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3505 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3508 ** Archaic window managers and toolkits
3510 *** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
3512 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3513 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3514 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3515 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3516 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
3518 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
3520 **** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
3522 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3523 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
3525 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
3527 ** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
3529 *** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
3531 This shell command should fix it:
3533 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
3535 *** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3538 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
3539 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
3541 * Build problems on legacy systems
3543 ** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
3545 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3546 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3549 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3550 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
3552 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3553 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
3555 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
3557 This problem manifests itself as an error message
3559 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
3561 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3562 were built for an older system version,
3564 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
3566 made the problem go away.
3568 ** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
3570 If you get errors such as
3572 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3573 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3574 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
3576 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3577 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3578 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3579 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3580 ones available when you build Emacs.
3582 ** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
3584 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
3586 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
3588 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
3590 ** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
3592 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3593 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3594 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
3596 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3597 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
3599 ** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
3601 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3602 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3603 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3604 with a floating point option other than the default.
3606 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3607 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3608 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3609 floating point option: -fsoft.
3611 ** SunOS: Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose.
3613 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
3614 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
3615 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
3616 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
3619 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
3620 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
3621 X11R4, then use it in the link.
3623 ** SunOS4, DGUX 5.4.2: --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
3625 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
3626 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
3627 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
3628 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
3629 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
3630 and Solaris in version 19.29.
3632 ** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3634 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3636 ** VMS: Compilation errors on VMS.
3638 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
3639 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
3640 This is not an error. Ignore it.
3642 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
3643 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
3645 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
3646 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
3651 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
3652 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
3653 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
3655 ** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3657 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3659 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3660 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3662 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3663 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3664 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3665 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3666 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3667 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3668 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3670 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3671 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3672 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3673 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3674 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3677 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3678 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3683 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3684 causes the problem to go away.
3685 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3686 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3688 ** 68000 C compiler problems
3690 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3691 These are some that have been observed.
3693 *** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3694 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3695 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3697 *** "cannot reclaim" error.
3699 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3700 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3701 simpler expressions.
3703 *** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3705 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3706 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3708 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3713 test ((int *) arg.y);
3716 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3717 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3718 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3720 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3721 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3723 *** C compilers lose on returning unions.
3725 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3726 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3727 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3729 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3730 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3733 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
3735 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
3736 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
3737 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
3740 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
3741 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
3742 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
3743 GNU General Public License for more details.
3745 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
3746 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
3747 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
3748 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
3753 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"
3756 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a