msdos/INSTALL

   1 GNU Emacs Installation Guide for the DJGPP (a.k.a. MS-DOS) port
   2
   3 Copyright (C) 1992, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004,
   4 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008  Free Software Foundation, Inc.
   5 See the end of the file for license conditions.
   6
   7 The DJGPP port of GNU Emacs builds and runs on plain DOS and also on
   8 all versions of MS-Windows from version 3.X on, including Windows XP
   9 and Vista.
  10
  11 To build and install the DJGPP port, you need to have the DJGPP ports
  12 of GCC (the GNU C compiler), GNU Make, rm, mv, and sed.  See the
  13 remarks in CONFIG.BAT for more information about locations and
  14 versions.  The Emacs FAQ (see info/efaq) includes pointers to Internet
  15 sites where you can find the necessary utilities; search for "MS-DOS".
  16 The configuration step (see below) will test for these utilities and
  17 will refuse to continue if any of them isn't found.
  18
  19 Recompiling Lisp files in the `lisp' subdirectory using the various
  20 targets in the lisp/Makefile file requires additional utilities:
  21 `find' (from Findutils), GNU `echo' and `test' (from Sh-utils), and a
  22 port of Bash.  However, you should not normally need to run
  23 lisp/Makefile, as all the Lisp files are distributed in byte-compiled
  24 form as well.
  25
  26 If you are building the DJGPP version of Emacs on an DOS-like system
  27 which supports long file names (e.g. Windows 9X or Windows XP), you
  28 need to make sure that long file names are handled consistently both
  29 when you unpack the distribution and compile it.  If you intend to
  30 compile with DJGPP v2.0 or later, and long file names support is
  31 enabled (LFN=y in the environment), you need to unpack Emacs
  32 distribution in a way that doesn't truncate the original long
  33 filenames to the DOS 8.3 namespace; the easiest way to do this is to
  34 use djtar program which comes with DJGPP, since it will note the LFN
  35 setting and behave accordingly.  You can build Emacs with LFN=n, if
  36 some of your tools don't support long file names: just ensure that LFN
  37 is set to `n' during both unpacking and compiling.
  38
  39 (By the time you read this, you have already unpacked the Emacs
  40 distribution, but if the explanations above imply that you should have
  41 done it differently, it's safer to delete the directory tree created
  42 by the unpacking program and unpack Emacs again, than to risk running
  43 into problems during the build process.)
  44
  45 It is important to understand that the runtime support of long file
  46 names by the Emacs binary is NOT affected by the LFN setting during
  47 compilation; Emacs compiled with DJGPP v2.0 or later will always
  48 support long file names on Windows no matter what was the setting
  49 of LFN at compile time.  However, if you compiled with LFN disabled
  50 and want to enable LFN support after Emacs was already built, you need
  51 to make sure that the support files in the lisp, etc and info
  52 directories are called by their original long names as found in the
  53 distribution.  You can do this either by renaming the files manually,
  54 or by extracting them from the original distribution archive with
  55 djtar after you set LFN=y in the environment.
  56
  57 To unpack Emacs with djtar, type this command:
  58
  59     djtar -x emacs.tgz
  60
  61 (This assumes that the Emacs distribution is called `emacs.tgz' on
  62 your system.)
  63
  64 If you want to print international characters, install the intlfonts
  65 distribution.  For this, create a directory called `fonts' under the
  66 Emacs top-level directory (usually called `emacs-XX.YY') created by
  67 unpacking emacs.tgz, chdir into the directory emacs-XX.YY/fonts, and
  68 type this:
  69
  70     djtar -x intlfonts.tgz
  71
  72 When unpacking Emacs is done, a directory called `emacs-XX.YY' will be
  73 created, where XX.YY is the Emacs version.  To build and install
  74 Emacs, chdir to that directory and type these commands:
  75
  76     config msdos
  77     make install
  78
  79 Running "config msdos" checks for several programs that are required
  80 to configure and build Emacs; if one of those programs is not found,
  81 CONFIG.BAT stops and prints an error message.  If you have DJGPP
  82 version 2.0 or 2.01, it will complain about a program called
  83 DJECHO.EXE.  These old versions of DJGPP shipped that program under
  84 the name ECHO.EXE, so you can simply copy ECHO.EXE to DJECHO.EXE and
  85 rerun CONFIG.BAT.  If you have neither ECHO.EXE nor DJECHO.EXE, you
  86 should be able to find them in your djdevNNN.zip archive (where NNN is
  87 the DJGPP version number).
  88
  89 On Windows NT, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, running "config msdos" might
  90 print an error message like "VDM has been already loaded".  This is
  91 because those systems have a program called `redir.exe' which is
  92 incompatible with a program by the same name supplied with DJGPP,
  93 which is used by config.bat.  To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin'
  94 subdirectory to the front of your PATH environment variable.
  95
  96 To install the international fonts, chdir to the intlfonts-X.Y
  97 directory created when you unpacked the intlfonts distribution (X.Y is
  98 the version number of the fonts' distribution), and type the following
  99 command:
 100
 101     make bdf INSTALLDIR=..
 102
 103 After Make finishes, you may remove the directory intlfonts-X.Y; the
 104 fonts are installed into the fonts/bdf subdirectory of the top-level
 105 Emacs directory, and that is where Emacs will look for them by
 106 default.
 107
 108 Building Emacs creates executable files in the src and lib-src
 109 directories.  Installing the DJGPP port of Emacs moves these
 110 executables to a sibling directory called bin.  For example, if you
 111 build in directory C:/emacs, installing moves the executables from
 112 C:/emacs/src and C:/emacs/lib-src to the directory C:/emacs/bin, so
 113 you can then delete the subdirectories C:/emacs/src and
 114 C:/emacs/lib-src if you wish.  The only subdirectories you need to
 115 keep are bin, lisp, etc and info.  (If you installed intlfonts, keep
 116 the fonts directory and all its subdirectories as well.)  The bin
 117 subdirectory should be added to your PATH.  The msdos subdirectory
 118 includes a PIF and an icon file for Emacs which you might find useful
 119 if you run Emacs under MS Windows.
 120
 121 Emacs on MSDOS finds the lisp, etc and info directories by looking in
 122 ../lisp, ../etc and ../info, starting from the directory where the
 123 Emacs executable was run from.  You can override this by setting the
 124 environment variables EMACSDATA (for the location of `etc' directory),
 125 EMACSLOADPATH (for the location of `lisp' directory) and INFOPATH (for
 126 the location of the `info' directory).
 127
 128 Emacs features which require asynchronous subprocesses that depend on
 129 multitasking do not work in the DJGPP port.  Synchronous subprocesses
 130 do work, so features such as compilation and grep run synchronously,
 131 unlike opn other platforms.
 132
 133 Version 2.0 of djgpp has two bugs that affect Emacs.  We've included
 134 corrected versions of two files from djgpp in the msdos subdirectory:
 135 is_exec.c and sigaction.c.  To work around the bugs, compile these
 136 files and link them into temacs.  Djgpp versions 2.01 and later have
 137 these bugs fixed, so upgrade if you can before building Emacs.
 138
 139 \f
 140 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
 141
 142 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 143 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 144 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 145 (at your option) any later version.
 146
 147 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 148 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 149 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 150 GNU General Public License for more details.
 151
 152 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 153 along with GNU Emacs.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.