1 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
3 and browsing through the outline headers.
5 * Mule-UCS doesn't work in Emacs 23.
7 It's completely redundant now, as far as we know.
9 * Emacs startup failures
11 ** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
13 A typical error message might be something like
15 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
17 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
18 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
21 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
23 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
24 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
25 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
27 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
28 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
29 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
31 ** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
33 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
34 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
35 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
36 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
37 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
38 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
39 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
40 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
43 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
44 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
45 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
46 same directory where system header files are kept.
48 ** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
50 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
51 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
52 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
53 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
54 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
55 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
57 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
58 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
59 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
60 it constitutes a separate package.
62 ** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
64 The typical error message might be like this:
66 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
68 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
69 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
70 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
71 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
72 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
73 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
74 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
76 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
77 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
79 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
82 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
83 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
84 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
86 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
88 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
89 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
92 ** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
94 An example of such an error is:
96 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
98 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
99 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
100 present in load-path:
102 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
104 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
105 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
108 ** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
110 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
112 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
113 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
115 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
116 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
117 /******************************************************************
119 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
126 + char* begin = NULL;
130 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
133 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
135 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
136 + if (begin != NULL) {
137 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
141 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
147 ** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
149 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
150 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
151 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
152 happens to exist on your X server).
154 ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
156 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
157 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
158 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
160 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
161 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
163 ** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
164 a segmentation fault and core dump.
166 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
167 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
169 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
171 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
174 ** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
175 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
176 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
177 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
180 ** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
182 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
183 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
184 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
185 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
186 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
188 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
189 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
192 ** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
194 If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
195 reported to prevent the crashes.
197 ** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
199 It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
201 This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
202 the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
203 flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
204 necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
206 On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
207 configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
209 * General runtime problems
213 *** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
215 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
216 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
217 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
218 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
220 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
221 than the corresponding .el file.
223 *** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
225 These control the actions of Emacs.
226 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
227 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
230 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
231 of them, then try again.
233 *** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
235 The error message might be something like this:
237 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
239 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
240 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
241 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
244 *** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
246 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
247 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
248 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
250 *** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
251 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
252 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
253 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
257 *** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
259 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
260 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
261 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
262 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
263 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
264 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
266 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
267 them to two different keys.
269 *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
271 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
272 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
273 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
275 *** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
276 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
278 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
279 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
280 another escape character in kermit. One user did
282 set escape-character 17
284 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
286 ** Mailers and other helper programs
288 *** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
290 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
291 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
292 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
293 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
294 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
297 *** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
299 RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
300 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
301 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
303 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
304 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
305 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
306 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
307 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
308 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
309 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
311 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
312 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
313 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
314 `mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
319 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
320 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
321 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
322 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
328 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
329 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
330 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
331 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
332 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
333 directory copy is ineffective.
335 *** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
337 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
338 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
340 ** Problems with hostname resolution
342 *** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
343 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
344 *** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
345 *** GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
347 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
348 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
349 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
350 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
352 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
353 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
355 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
356 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
358 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
360 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
361 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
362 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
363 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
364 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
365 be careful not to lose the others.
367 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
369 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
371 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
372 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
375 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
377 *** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
379 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
380 either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
381 calls for specifying this.
383 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
384 mail-host-address to the value you want.
388 *** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
391 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
392 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
393 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
394 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
395 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
396 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
398 *** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
399 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
400 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
403 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
404 call in the RFS server.
406 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
407 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
408 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
409 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
411 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
413 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
414 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
415 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
416 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
417 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
418 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
419 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
421 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
423 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
424 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
425 retrieving revision 1.2
426 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
427 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
428 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
432 * No return sent for close or fsync!
434 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
435 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
440 * No return sent for close or fsync!
442 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
443 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
449 *** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
450 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
451 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
453 *** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
455 PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
456 as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
457 of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
458 sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
459 HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
460 (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
461 (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
463 *** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
464 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
465 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
468 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
469 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
470 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
471 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
473 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
474 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
475 + (insert-file-contents entity)
476 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
477 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
478 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
482 You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
485 *** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
487 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
490 *** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
492 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
493 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
497 *** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit.
499 When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examined
500 directory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous message
501 from which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committed
502 files. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer are
503 not updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines are
504 added to the top-level directory.
506 This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS
507 1.12.10 or newer to fix this problem.
509 ** Miscellaneous problems
511 *** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
513 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
514 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
515 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
517 *** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
520 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
521 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
522 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
525 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
526 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
527 it only if it is undefined.
529 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
531 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
532 happen in a non-login shell.
534 *** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
536 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
537 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
538 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
539 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
542 if ($EMACS == "t") then
544 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
548 *** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
550 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
551 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
552 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
555 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
557 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
559 *** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
561 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
562 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
563 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
564 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
565 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
566 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
568 update-alternatives --config ftp
570 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
572 *** JPEG images aren't displayed.
574 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
575 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
576 correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
577 against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
579 *** Dired is very slow.
581 This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
582 time. Possible reasons for this include:
584 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
585 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
587 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
589 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
591 To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
592 `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
593 invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
594 (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
596 *** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
597 under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
599 *** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
601 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
602 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
603 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
604 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
606 *** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
608 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
609 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
610 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
612 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
614 *** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
615 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
616 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
617 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
618 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
620 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
621 process invokes Emacs several times.
623 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
624 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
627 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
628 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
629 specified run-time search path in the executable.
631 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
632 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
633 backtraces like this:
636 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]
637 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
638 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
639 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
640 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
641 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
642 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
643 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
644 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
646 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
647 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
648 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
649 to work around the problem.
651 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
653 *** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
654 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
656 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
657 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
658 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
660 *** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
662 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
663 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
664 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
665 support for 8-bit characters.
667 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
668 this at your shell's prompt:
672 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
673 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
676 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
677 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
678 Then rebuild the speller.
680 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
681 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
683 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
684 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
685 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
686 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
687 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
689 If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
690 you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
691 can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
692 in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
694 * Runtime problems related to font handling
696 ** Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
698 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
699 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
700 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
702 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
703 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
704 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
706 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
707 display all the characters Emacs supports.
709 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
710 missing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur for
711 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
712 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
713 of this character to display a space.
715 ** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
717 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
719 ** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
721 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
722 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
723 lines do not overlap.
725 ** Loading fonts is very slow.
727 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
728 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
729 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
732 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
733 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
735 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
736 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
737 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
739 ** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
741 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
742 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
743 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
744 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
745 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
746 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
747 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
748 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
749 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
750 to the end of a very large buffer.
752 Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
753 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
754 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
755 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
757 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
758 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
759 fontification by setting the variable
760 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
761 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
763 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
764 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
766 ** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
767 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
769 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
770 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
771 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
773 ** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
775 This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
776 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
777 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
778 the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
779 fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
780 Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
781 and then start the application again.
782 If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
783 application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
784 of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
785 sufficient to recompile Qt.
787 ** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
789 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
790 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
791 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
792 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
794 A workaround for this is to add something like
796 emacs.waitForWM: false
798 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
799 frame's parameter list, like this:
801 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
803 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
805 ** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
807 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
808 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
809 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
810 problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
813 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
814 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
817 ** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
819 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
820 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
821 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
822 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
823 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
825 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
826 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
828 * Internationalization problems
830 ** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
832 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
833 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
834 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
835 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
836 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
837 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
838 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
839 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
840 include in the fontset spec:
842 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
843 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
844 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
846 ** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
848 Emacs by default only supports the parts of the Unicode BMP whose code
849 points are in the ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff. This excludes: most
850 of CJK, Yi and Hangul, as well as everything outside the BMP.
852 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
853 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
854 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
855 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
856 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
857 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
860 To edit such UTF data, turn on Utf-Translate-Cjk mode, which makes
861 many common CJK characters available for encoding and decoding and can
862 be extended by updating the tables it uses. This also allows you to
863 save as UTF buffers containing characters decoded by the chinese-,
864 japanese- and korean- coding systems, e.g. cut and pasted from
867 ** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
869 Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
870 library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
871 following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
872 though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
873 distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
875 --- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
876 +++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
877 @@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
883 - (mucs-define-coding-system
884 - (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
885 - (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
886 - (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
888 + (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
889 + ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
890 + ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
891 + ;; system definitions.
892 + (let ((y (cadr x)))
893 + (mucs-define-coding-system
894 + (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
895 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
898 + (mucs-define-coding-system
899 + (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
900 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
901 + (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
905 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
907 Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
908 Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
910 ** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
912 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
913 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
914 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
915 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
916 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
917 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
919 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
921 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
923 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
926 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
927 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
930 ** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
932 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
933 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
934 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
935 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
936 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
938 ** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
940 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
941 (standard-display-european t)
942 That should be changed to
943 (standard-display-european 1 t)
947 ** X keyboard problems
949 *** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
951 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
952 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
953 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
954 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
956 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
958 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
960 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
961 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
962 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
964 *** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
966 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
968 *** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
970 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
971 for character composition.
973 *** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
975 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
976 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
977 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
978 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
981 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
982 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
984 *** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
986 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
987 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
988 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
989 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
992 *** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
994 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
995 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
996 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
998 *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
999 directly with an X server.
1001 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
1002 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
1003 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
1004 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
1005 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
1006 have made the key binding correctly.
1008 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
1009 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
1010 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
1013 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
1015 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
1016 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
1018 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1019 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1020 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1021 modifier bit not otherwise used.
1023 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1024 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1025 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1026 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
1028 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1029 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
1031 ** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
1033 *** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
1035 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1036 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1037 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1038 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1041 *** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1044 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1045 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1048 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1049 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1050 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1051 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1052 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1054 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1055 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1056 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1057 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1058 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1059 present or commented out:
1061 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1062 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1066 *** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1068 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1069 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1070 of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1071 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1072 while, Emacs may print a message:
1074 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1076 A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
1077 comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
1079 *** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1081 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1082 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1083 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1084 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1086 *** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1087 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1088 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1091 *** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1092 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1093 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1094 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1095 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1096 used with neXtaw at run time.
1098 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1099 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1102 *** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
1104 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1105 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1106 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1107 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
1109 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1110 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
1112 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1113 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1114 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
1116 *** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
1118 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1119 emulation for which it is set up.
1121 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
1122 Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
1123 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1124 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1125 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1126 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1129 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1130 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1131 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1134 *** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1136 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1138 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1140 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1141 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1142 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1143 the resource prevents the problem.
1145 ** General X problems
1147 *** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1149 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1150 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1151 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1152 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1154 Here's how to do this:
1156 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1158 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1159 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1162 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1164 *** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
1166 The messages might say something like this:
1168 Unable to load color "grey95"
1170 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
1172 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
1174 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1175 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1176 resources to load all the colors it needs.
1178 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
1180 *** Improving performance with slow X connections.
1182 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1183 be carried out at the same time:
1185 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1186 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1187 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1188 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1191 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
1192 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
1194 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1195 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
1197 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1198 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1199 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1200 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1201 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
1202 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate
1203 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1204 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1205 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1206 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1207 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
1209 *** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1211 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1212 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1215 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1217 *** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1219 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1220 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1222 *** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
1224 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1225 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1226 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1229 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1230 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1231 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1232 workaround can be found.
1234 *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1235 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
1237 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1239 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1240 that isn't a color.)
1242 The fix is to correct your X resources.
1244 *** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
1246 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1247 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1248 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1251 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1252 your font path, like this:
1254 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
1256 *** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
1258 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
1260 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
1262 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1263 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1264 want, rewrite the resource.
1266 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1267 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1268 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
1270 *** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1271 *** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
1273 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1274 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1277 *** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
1279 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1280 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1281 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
1283 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1284 whether this problem is present on a given system.
1286 *** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
1288 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1289 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1290 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1291 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
1293 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1294 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1295 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
1297 The easy way to do this is to put
1299 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
1301 in your site-init.el file.
1303 * Runtime problems on character termunals
1305 ** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
1307 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1308 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1309 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1310 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1311 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1312 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1313 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1314 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
1316 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
1318 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1319 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1320 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
1322 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1323 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1324 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
1325 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1326 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1327 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
1329 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1330 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1331 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1332 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1333 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1334 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1335 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1336 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1337 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
1339 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1340 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1341 codes. You might as well try it.
1343 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1344 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1345 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1346 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1347 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1348 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1349 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1350 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
1352 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1353 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1354 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1355 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1356 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1359 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1360 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1361 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1362 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1363 other control characters are already used by emacs.
1365 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1366 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1369 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1370 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1371 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1372 automatically. Here is an example:
1374 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1376 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1377 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1380 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1381 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1382 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1383 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1384 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1385 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1386 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1387 of inferior systems.
1389 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
1391 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1392 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1393 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1394 that wants to use flow control.
1396 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1397 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1398 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
1400 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1401 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1402 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
1404 ** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
1406 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1407 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1408 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
1410 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1411 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1412 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1413 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1414 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1415 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1416 There are several possibilities:
1418 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
1420 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1421 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
1423 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1424 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1427 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1428 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1429 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1430 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1431 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1432 tested on many kinds of terminals.
1434 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
1436 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1437 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1438 for certain terminals.
1440 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1441 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
1443 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1444 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
1446 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
1448 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1449 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1450 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1451 control on the local system.
1453 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1454 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1455 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1456 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
1458 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1459 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1460 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
1462 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1463 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1464 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1465 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
1467 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1469 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1472 ** Output from Control-V is slow.
1474 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1475 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1476 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1477 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1478 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1479 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
1481 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1482 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1483 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1484 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1485 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1486 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1487 time as the operations really take.
1489 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1490 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1491 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1492 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1493 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1494 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1495 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1496 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1497 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1498 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
1500 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1501 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1502 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1503 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1504 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1505 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1508 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1509 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1510 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
1512 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1513 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
1515 ** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
1517 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1520 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1521 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1522 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1523 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1524 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1527 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1528 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1529 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1530 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1531 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1532 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
1534 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1535 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1536 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1537 You can probably access help-command via f1.
1539 ** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
1541 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1542 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1543 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1544 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1545 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1546 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1547 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1550 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1551 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1552 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1553 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1554 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1555 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1556 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1559 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1560 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1561 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1562 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
1564 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1565 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1566 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1567 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1570 Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line
1571 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1572 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1573 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
1575 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1576 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1577 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1578 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1579 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1580 `global-font-lock-mode'.
1582 * Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
1586 *** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1587 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1589 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1590 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1593 *** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1594 the Meta key stops working.
1596 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1597 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1598 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1599 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1600 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1601 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1602 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1604 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1605 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1606 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1607 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1608 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1611 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1613 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1614 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1616 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1618 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1619 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1620 keys can serve as Meta.
1622 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1623 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1625 *** GNU/Linux: low startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1627 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1628 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1630 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1631 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1632 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1633 networked and non-networked machines.
1635 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1637 **** Networked Case.
1639 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1640 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1641 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1645 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1651 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1652 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1653 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1654 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1656 **** Non-Networked Case.
1658 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1659 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1660 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1661 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1662 file is not necessary with this approach.
1664 *** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
1666 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1667 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1668 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1669 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1670 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1671 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1672 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1675 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1676 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1677 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1678 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1679 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1680 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
1682 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1683 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1684 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1685 produce a modified terminfo entry.
1687 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1688 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
1690 *** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1692 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1693 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1694 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1695 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1697 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1701 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Environment Variables from dotfiles are ignored.
1703 When starting Emacs from the Dock or the Finder on Mac OS X, the
1704 environment variables that are set up in dotfiles, such as .cshrc or
1705 .profile, are ignored. This is because the Finder and Dock are not
1706 started from a shell, but instead from the Window Manager itself.
1708 The workaround for this is to create a .MacOSX/environment.plist file to
1709 setup these environment variables. These environment variables will
1710 apply to all processes regardless of where they are started.
1711 For me information, see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html.
1713 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Process output truncated when using ptys.
1715 There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
1716 Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
1717 leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
1721 *** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1722 directories that have the +t bit.
1724 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1725 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1726 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1727 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1729 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1730 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1732 *** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
1734 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1735 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1736 current keymap to a file with the command
1738 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
1740 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1741 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1742 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1745 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
1747 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
1749 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
1753 *** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
1755 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
1757 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1758 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1759 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1760 but tty is giving it back 3.
1762 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1765 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
1767 should be changed to:
1769 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
1771 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1774 *** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
1776 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1777 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1778 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1779 value is just ten seconds.
1781 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
1783 *** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1784 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1786 This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1787 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1788 configures the X server.
1790 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1791 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1792 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1797 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1799 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1800 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1803 *** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1804 Emacs built with Motif.
1806 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1807 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1809 *** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
1811 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1812 rights, containing this text:
1814 --------------------------------
1815 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1816 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1817 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1822 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1824 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1825 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1827 --------------------------------
1829 *** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
1831 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1835 *** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
1837 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
1838 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
1840 *** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
1842 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
1844 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
1845 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
1847 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
1849 *** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
1850 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
1851 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
1852 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
1854 *** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
1856 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
1857 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
1858 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
1859 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
1861 *** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1862 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1864 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1865 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1866 Definitions" to make them defined.
1870 We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
1871 section on legacy systems.
1873 *** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
1875 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
1876 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
1878 *** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
1880 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
1881 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
1882 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
1883 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
1885 *** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1887 We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
1888 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1889 makes the problem stop:
1891 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1892 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1893 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1894 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1896 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1897 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1899 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1900 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1901 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1903 *** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
1905 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
1906 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
1908 *** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1909 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1911 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1913 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1915 *** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
1916 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
1918 You can fix this by editing the file:
1920 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
1922 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
1924 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1928 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1930 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
1934 *** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
1936 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
1938 *** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
1940 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
1941 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
1942 to allocate ptys reliably.
1944 * Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
1946 ** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
1948 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
1949 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
1952 ** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.2.
1954 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
1955 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
1956 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
1957 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
1958 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
1959 pop-up menu interaction.
1961 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
1962 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
1964 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
1965 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
1966 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
1967 after moving back into it.
1969 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
1970 not as severely as in 21.1.
1972 Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
1973 characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
1975 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
1976 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
1978 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.2). Some
1979 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
1980 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
1981 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
1982 work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
1983 you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
1984 the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
1985 ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
1986 appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
1989 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
1990 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
1991 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
1994 ** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
1996 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1997 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
1998 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
1999 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
2000 or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
2002 ** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
2004 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
2005 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
2006 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
2007 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
2008 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
2010 ** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2012 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
2013 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
2014 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
2015 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
2016 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
2019 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2020 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2021 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2022 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2023 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2024 client's executable. For example:
2026 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
2028 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2029 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
2031 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
2033 ** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
2035 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2036 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
2038 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2039 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2040 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2041 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2044 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2045 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2046 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2047 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
2049 ** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2051 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2052 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2053 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2054 work when an antivirus package is installed.
2056 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2057 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2058 or disable it entirely.
2060 ** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
2062 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2063 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2064 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2065 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2066 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2067 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2068 generic mouse driver might help.
2070 ** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
2072 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2073 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2074 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2075 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
2077 ** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2078 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2079 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2082 ** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2083 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
2085 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
2087 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2088 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2089 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2090 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2091 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2092 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
2094 ** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
2096 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2097 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2098 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2099 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
2101 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2102 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2103 problem lies in the X-server settings.
2105 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2106 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2107 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2110 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2111 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2112 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2115 * Build-time problems
2119 *** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
2121 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2122 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2123 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
2125 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2126 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2127 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2128 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2129 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2130 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
2134 *** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
2136 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
2137 (RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
2138 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2139 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2140 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2141 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2142 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2143 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
2145 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2146 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2147 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2148 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
2150 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2151 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2152 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2153 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2154 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2155 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2156 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2157 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2160 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2161 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2162 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2163 to work around the problem.
2165 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2166 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2167 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2168 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
2170 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
2172 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
2174 *** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
2176 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2177 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2178 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2179 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2180 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2181 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2182 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2183 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2186 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2187 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2188 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2189 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2190 run the script like this:
2192 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
2194 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2197 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2198 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
2200 *** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2201 *** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2203 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2204 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2205 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2208 *** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2210 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2211 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2212 Emacs's configure script.
2214 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
2216 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2217 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2218 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2219 __MSVCRT__, like so:
2221 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
2223 *** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
2225 Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2226 to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2227 fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
2229 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
2231 The error message might be something like this:
2233 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
2234 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
2235 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
2239 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
2240 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
2241 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
2242 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
2245 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
2246 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
2247 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
2248 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
2251 *** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
2253 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2254 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2255 patch to assert.h should solve this:
2257 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2258 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2262 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2264 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
2266 #else /* debugging enabled */
2270 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2272 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
2274 #else /* debugging enabled */
2279 *** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2280 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
2282 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2283 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2284 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2285 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2286 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2289 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
2293 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2294 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
2296 *** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
2298 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2299 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2303 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2304 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2306 *** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2307 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2308 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2310 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2311 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2314 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2318 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2321 *** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2323 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2325 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2327 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2329 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2330 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2332 *** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2334 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2336 *** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
2338 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2339 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2340 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2341 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2342 does not work with this version of ncurses.
2344 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
2348 *** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
2350 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Redhat Fedora Core
2351 1 and 2), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
2352 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper.
2354 Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
2355 x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
2356 workaround is known.
2358 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
2360 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2362 It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
2363 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
2364 associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
2366 echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2368 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2369 execution of this command:
2371 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2373 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
2374 Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
2375 command when running temacs like this:
2377 setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2380 *** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
2382 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2383 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2385 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2386 space available on the machine.
2388 On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2389 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2390 for large blocks (many pages).
2392 *** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2393 *** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2394 *** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2395 *** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
2397 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2398 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2399 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2401 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2402 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2403 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2404 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2405 when unpacking the shell archive.
2407 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2408 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2409 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2411 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2412 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2414 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2415 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2416 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2417 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2418 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2419 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2420 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2421 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2422 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2423 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2424 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2426 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2428 *** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
2430 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2431 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2432 space than was allocated.
2434 This could be caused by
2435 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2436 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2437 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2438 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2439 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2440 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2442 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2443 (not from the directory you expected).
2444 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2445 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2446 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2447 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2450 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2451 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2453 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2454 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2457 *** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
2459 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2460 C backtrace printed by GDB:
2462 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2464 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2465 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2466 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2467 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
2469 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2470 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2471 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2472 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2473 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2474 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2475 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2478 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2479 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2480 know what's really going on here. */
2481 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2483 #if defined __linux__
2484 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2485 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2490 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2491 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2496 *** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
2498 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2499 supplies the `install-info' command.
2503 *** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
2505 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2506 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2507 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2508 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
2510 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
2512 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2513 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
2515 *** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2517 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2519 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2520 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2521 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2522 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2524 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2525 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2526 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2527 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2528 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2532 ** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
2534 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2535 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2536 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2537 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2539 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2541 * Runtime problems on legacy systems
2543 This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2544 If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2545 it is unlikely you will see any of these.
2547 ** Ancient operating systems
2549 AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2551 *** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2553 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2554 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2556 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2557 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2558 X11Dev... with smit.
2560 (This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2562 *** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2564 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2565 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2566 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2567 treated as control characters.
2569 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2570 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2572 *** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2574 Could not load program emacs
2575 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2576 Error was: Exec format error
2580 Could not load program .emacs
2581 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2582 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2583 Error was: Exec format error
2585 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2586 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2588 *** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
2590 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
2591 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
2595 **** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2597 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2598 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2599 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2600 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2601 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2603 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2604 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2606 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2610 SunOS 4.1.4 stopped shipping on Sep 30 1998.
2612 **** SunOS: You get linker errors
2613 ld: Undefined symbol
2614 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
2615 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
2617 **** Sun 4.0.x: M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2619 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2620 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2622 **** SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3: Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2624 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2625 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2626 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2627 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2628 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2629 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2630 obtain the destination address.
2632 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2633 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2634 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
2635 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
2636 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2637 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2638 of this writing, these official versions are available:
2640 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2641 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2642 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2643 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2644 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2646 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2647 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2649 **** Sunos 4: You get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2651 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2652 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2653 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2655 **** SunOS 4.1.3: Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
2657 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
2658 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
2659 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
2660 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
2662 **** Sunos 4.1.3: Emacs gets hung shortly after startup.
2664 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2665 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2667 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2668 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2669 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2670 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2671 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2673 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2674 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2676 **** SunOS 4: Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
2677 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
2679 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
2681 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
2682 or link libXmu statically.
2684 **** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
2686 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2687 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2688 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2689 communicating through pipes.
2693 **** Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain.
2695 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2697 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2699 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2700 Here is how to make more of them.
2704 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2706 # creates eight new pty's
2710 *** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
2712 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
2715 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
2717 *** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
2718 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
2720 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
2722 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
2723 003082 August 11, 1998.
2727 **** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
2729 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
2732 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
2734 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
2735 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
2736 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
2738 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
2740 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
2741 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
2743 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
2744 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
2748 **** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
2750 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
2751 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
2754 **** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
2756 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
2757 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
2758 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
2760 **** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
2762 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
2763 version of Solaris that you are using.
2765 **** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
2767 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
2768 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
2770 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
2772 **** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
2774 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
2775 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
2776 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
2777 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
2778 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
2780 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
2781 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
2782 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
2785 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
2786 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
2787 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
2789 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
2790 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
2792 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
2793 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2795 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
2798 **** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
2799 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
2801 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
2802 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
2805 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2810 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
2812 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2816 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
2817 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
2818 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
2819 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
2820 definition for your type of machine and system.
2822 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
2823 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
2824 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
2826 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
2827 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
2828 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
2831 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
2833 #define ThreadedX YES
2835 #define ThreadedX NO
2836 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
2837 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
2838 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
2840 **** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
2842 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2843 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2844 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2845 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2846 described in the Solaris FAQ
2847 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2848 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
2850 **** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
2851 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
2852 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
2853 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
2854 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
2855 and the default CFLAGS.
2857 **** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
2859 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
2860 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
2861 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
2862 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
2863 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
2864 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
2865 are currently recommended for your host.
2867 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
2868 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
2869 105284-18 might fix it again.
2871 **** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
2873 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
2874 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
2875 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
2876 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
2878 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
2879 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
2880 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
2881 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
2884 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
2885 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
2888 *** HP/UX versions before 11.0
2890 HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
2891 HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
2893 **** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
2895 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
2896 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
2899 *** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
2901 See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
2903 *** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
2905 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2906 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2907 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2908 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2909 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2910 install them and rebuild Emacs.
2912 *** Ultrix and Digital Unix
2914 **** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2916 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2917 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2918 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2921 **** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
2923 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
2924 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
2925 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
2926 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
2929 **** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2931 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2932 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2933 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2934 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2936 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2937 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2939 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2940 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2941 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2942 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2946 **** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2948 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2949 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2950 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2952 **** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2954 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2955 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2956 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2958 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2959 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2960 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2961 configure script) that reads:
2962 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2963 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2966 *** Irix 5 and earlier
2968 Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
2969 shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
2971 **** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
2973 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
2974 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
2975 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
2976 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
2979 **** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
2981 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
2982 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
2983 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
2984 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
2987 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
2990 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
2992 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
2993 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
2994 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
2995 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
2998 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
2999 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
3000 on the network that can log on to the host.
3002 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
3003 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
3004 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
3007 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
3008 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
3009 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
3010 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
3012 **** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
3014 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
3015 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
3017 **** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
3019 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
3020 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
3021 find that string, and take out the spaces.
3023 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
3025 *** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3027 **** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3029 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3030 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3031 fonts, so it does not work.
3033 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3034 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3035 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3036 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3037 resources affect Emacs also:
3039 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3040 *Background: scoBackground
3041 *Foreground: scoForeground
3043 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3044 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3046 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3047 Emacs*Background: white
3048 Emacs*Foreground: black
3050 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3051 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3052 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3053 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3054 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3055 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3056 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3057 Open Desktop display.
3059 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3060 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3062 **** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3064 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3065 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3066 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3067 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3070 **** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3072 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3073 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3074 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3075 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3076 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3077 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3079 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3080 But you have to be root to do it.
3082 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3084 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3085 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3086 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3087 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3088 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3090 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3091 These changes take effect when you reboot.
3095 **** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
3097 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3098 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3099 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
3101 **** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3102 truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
3104 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
3107 ** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3109 *** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3111 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3112 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3114 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3115 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3118 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3119 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3120 communicate with the subprocess.
3122 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3123 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3124 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3127 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3131 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3132 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3139 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3147 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3152 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3153 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3160 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3168 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3172 *** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3174 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3175 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3177 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3179 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3180 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3181 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3182 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3184 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3186 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3187 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3188 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3189 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3194 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
3196 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3197 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3198 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3199 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3200 the front of your PATH environment variable.
3202 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3205 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3206 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3207 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
3208 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
3210 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
3212 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
3214 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3215 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3216 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3217 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3218 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3219 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3220 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3221 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3222 your system works as before.
3224 *** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
3226 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3227 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3228 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3229 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3230 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
3232 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3233 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3234 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3235 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
3237 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3238 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3239 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3240 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3241 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
3243 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3244 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3245 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
3247 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3248 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3249 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
3251 *** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
3253 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
3255 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3256 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3257 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
3259 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3260 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3261 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3262 incorrect library functions.
3264 *** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3265 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
3267 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3268 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3269 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3270 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
3272 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3273 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3276 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3277 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3278 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3279 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3280 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3281 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
3282 explains this issue in more detail.
3284 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3285 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3286 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3287 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3288 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3289 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3292 ** Archaic window managers and toolkits
3294 *** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
3296 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3297 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3298 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3299 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3300 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
3302 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
3304 **** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
3306 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3307 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
3309 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
3311 ** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
3313 *** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
3315 This shell command should fix it:
3317 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
3319 *** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3322 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
3323 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
3325 * Build problems on legacy systems
3327 ** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
3329 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3330 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3333 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3334 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
3336 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3337 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
3339 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
3341 This problem manifests itself as an error message
3343 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
3345 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3346 were built for an older system version,
3348 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
3350 made the problem go away.
3352 ** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
3354 If you get errors such as
3356 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3357 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3358 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
3360 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3361 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3362 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3363 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3364 ones available when you build Emacs.
3366 ** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
3368 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
3370 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
3372 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
3374 ** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
3376 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3377 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3378 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
3380 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3381 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
3383 ** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
3385 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3386 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3387 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3388 with a floating point option other than the default.
3390 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3391 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3392 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3393 floating point option: -fsoft.
3395 ** SunOS: Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose.
3397 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
3398 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
3399 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
3400 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
3403 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
3404 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
3405 X11R4, then use it in the link.
3407 ** SunOS4, DGUX 5.4.2: --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
3409 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
3410 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
3411 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
3412 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
3413 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
3414 and Solaris in version 19.29.
3416 ** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3418 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3420 ** VMS: Compilation errors on VMS.
3422 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
3423 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
3424 This is not an error. Ignore it.
3426 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
3427 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
3429 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
3430 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
3435 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
3436 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
3437 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
3439 ** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3441 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3443 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3444 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3446 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3447 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3448 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3449 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3450 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3451 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3452 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3454 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3455 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3456 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3457 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3458 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3461 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3462 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3467 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3468 causes the problem to go away.
3469 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3470 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3472 ** 68000 C compiler problems
3474 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3475 These are some that have been observed.
3477 *** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3478 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3479 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3481 *** "cannot reclaim" error.
3483 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3484 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3485 simpler expressions.
3487 *** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3489 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3490 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3492 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3497 test ((int *) arg.y);
3500 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3501 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3502 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3504 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3505 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3507 *** C compilers lose on returning unions.
3509 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3510 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3511 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3513 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3514 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3517 Copyright 1987,88,89,93,94,95,96,97,98,1999,2001,2002,2004
3518 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3520 Copying and redistribution of this file with or without modification
3521 are permitted without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
3525 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"
3528 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a