msdos/INSTALL

   1 GNU Emacs Installation Guide for the DJGPP (a.k.a. MS-DOS) port
   2
   3 Copyright (C) 1992, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004,
   4 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010  Free Software Foundation, Inc.
   5 See the end of the file for license conditions.
   6
   7 The DJGPP port of GNU Emacs builds and runs on plain DOS and also on
   8 all versions of MS-Windows from version 3.X on, including Windows XP
   9 and Vista.
  10
  11 To build and install the DJGPP port, you need to have the DJGPP ports
  12 of GCC (the GNU C compiler), GNU Make, rm, mv, and sed.  See the
  13 remarks in CONFIG.BAT for more information about locations and
  14 versions.  The Emacs FAQ (see info/efaq) includes pointers to Internet
  15 sites where you can find the necessary utilities; search for "MS-DOS".
  16 The configuration step (see below) will test for these utilities and
  17 will refuse to continue if any of them isn't found.
  18
  19 Bootstrapping Emacs or recompiling Lisp files in the `lisp'
  20 subdirectory using the various targets in the lisp/Makefile file
  21 requires additional utilities: `find' (from Findutils), GNU `echo' and
  22 `test' (from Sh-utils), `ls' and `chmod' (from Fileutils), `grep'
  23 (from Grep), and a port of Bash.  However, you should not normally
  24 need to run lisp/Makefile, as all the Lisp files are distributed in
  25 byte-compiled form as well.  As for bootstrapping, you will only need
  26 that if you check-out development sources from the Emacs source
  27 repository.  (Note: If you are checking out of CVS, use the -kb option
  28 of the `checkout' and `update' commands, to preserve the original
  29 Unix-style EOL format of the files.  If some files are converted to
  30 DOS EOL format by the default operation of CVS, the build might fail.)
  31
  32 If you are building the DJGPP version of Emacs on a DOS-like system
  33 which supports long file names (e.g. Windows 9X or Windows XP), you
  34 need to make sure that long file names are handled consistently both
  35 when you unpack the distribution and compile it.  If you intend to
  36 compile with DJGPP v2.0 or later, and long file names support is
  37 enabled (LFN=y in the environment), you need to unpack Emacs
  38 distribution in a way that doesn't truncate the original long
  39 filenames to the DOS 8.3 namespace; the easiest way to do this is to
  40 use djtar program which comes with DJGPP, since it will note the LFN
  41 setting and behave accordingly.  You can build Emacs with LFN=n, if
  42 some of your tools don't support long file names: just ensure that LFN
  43 is set to `n' during both unpacking and compiling.
  44
  45 (By the time you read this, you have already unpacked the Emacs
  46 distribution, but if the explanations above imply that you should have
  47 done it differently, it's safer to delete the directory tree created
  48 by the unpacking program and unpack Emacs again, than to risk running
  49 into strange problems during the build process.)
  50
  51 It is important to understand that the runtime support of long file
  52 names by the Emacs binary is NOT affected by the LFN setting during
  53 compilation; Emacs compiled with DJGPP v2.0 or later will always
  54 support long file names on Windows no matter what was the setting
  55 of LFN at compile time.  However, if you compiled with LFN disabled
  56 and want to enable LFN support after Emacs was already built, you need
  57 to make sure that the support files in the lisp, etc and info
  58 directories are called by their original long names as found in the
  59 distribution.  You can do this either by renaming the files manually,
  60 or by extracting them from the original distribution archive with
  61 djtar after you set LFN=y in the environment.
  62
  63 To unpack Emacs with djtar, type this command:
  64
  65     djtar -x emacs.tgz
  66
  67 (This assumes that the Emacs distribution is called `emacs.tgz' on
  68 your system.)
  69
  70 When unpacking Emacs is done, a directory called `emacs-XX.YY' will be
  71 created, where XX.YY is the Emacs version.
  72
  73 On plain DOS, unpacking can complain about several directories and
  74 files in the `nextstep' subdirectory of the `emacs-XX.YY' top-level
  75 directory.  This is because the names of these files overflow the
  76 67-character limit on the file-name length imposed by DOS filesystems.
  77 When prompted by `djtar' for a different name for these files, just
  78 press [Enter] to skip them: they are not needed for the DJGPP build.
  79
  80 If you want to print international characters, install the intlfonts
  81 distribution.  For this, create a directory called `fonts' under the
  82 `emacs-XX.YY' top-level directory created by unpacking emacs.tgz,
  83 chdir into the directory `emacs-XX.YY/fonts', and type this:
  84
  85     djtar -x intlfonts.tgz
  86
  87 To build and install Emacs, chdir to the `emacs-XX.YY' directory and
  88 type these commands:
  89
  90     config msdos
  91     make install
  92
  93 Running "config msdos" checks for several programs that are required
  94 to configure and build Emacs; if one of those programs is not found,
  95 CONFIG.BAT stops and prints an error message.  If you have DJGPP
  96 version 2.0 or 2.01, it will complain about a program called
  97 DJECHO.EXE.  These old versions of DJGPP shipped that program under
  98 the name ECHO.EXE, so you can simply copy ECHO.EXE to DJECHO.EXE and
  99 rerun CONFIG.BAT.  If you have neither ECHO.EXE nor DJECHO.EXE, you
 100 should be able to find them in your djdevNNN.zip archive (where NNN is
 101 the DJGPP version number).
 102
 103 On Windows NT, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, running "config msdos" might
 104 print an error message like "VDM has been already loaded".  This is
 105 because those systems have a program called `redir.exe' which is
 106 incompatible with a program by the same name supplied with DJGPP,
 107 which is used by config.bat.  To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin'
 108 subdirectory to the front of your PATH environment variable.
 109
 110 Windows Vista has several bugs in its DPMI server related to memory
 111 allocation: it fails DPMI resize memory block function, and it
 112 arbitrarily limits the default amount of DPMI memory to 32MB.  To work
 113 around these bugs, first configure Emacs to use the `malloc' function
 114 from the DJGPP library.  To this end, run CONFIG.BAT with the
 115 "--with-system-malloc" option:
 116
 117     config --with-system-malloc msdos
 118     make install
 119
 120 In addition, you'll need to install Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later to
 121 Windows Vista and enlarge its DPMI memory limit by setting the value
 122 of this Registry key:
 123
 124   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Wow\DpmiLimit
 125
 126 Create this key if it does not exist.  The value is a DWORD; setting
 127 it to 536870912 should let Emacs use up to 512MB of memory.
 128
 129 If you have other problems, either building Emacs or running the
 130 produced binary, look in the file etc/PROBLEMS for some known problems
 131 related to the DJGPP port (search for "MS-DOS").
 132
 133 To install the international fonts, chdir to the intlfonts-X.Y
 134 directory created when you unpacked the intlfonts distribution (X.Y is
 135 the version number of the fonts' distribution), and type the following
 136 command:
 137
 138     make bdf INSTALLDIR=..
 139
 140 After Make finishes, you may remove the directory intlfonts-X.Y; the
 141 fonts are installed into the fonts/bdf subdirectory of the top-level
 142 Emacs directory, and that is where Emacs will look for them by
 143 default.
 144
 145 Building Emacs creates executable files in the src and lib-src
 146 directories.  Installing the DJGPP port of Emacs moves these
 147 executables to a sibling directory called bin.  For example, if you
 148 build in directory C:/emacs, installing moves the executables from
 149 C:/emacs/src and C:/emacs/lib-src to the directory C:/emacs/bin, so
 150 you can then delete the subdirectories C:/emacs/src and
 151 C:/emacs/lib-src if you wish.  The only subdirectories you need to
 152 keep are bin, lisp, etc and info.  (If you installed intlfonts, keep
 153 the fonts directory and all its subdirectories as well.)  The bin
 154 subdirectory should be added to your PATH.  The msdos subdirectory
 155 includes a PIF and an icon file for Emacs which you might find useful
 156 if you run Emacs under MS Windows.
 157
 158 Emacs on MSDOS finds the lisp, etc and info directories by looking in
 159 ../lisp, ../etc and ../info, starting from the directory where the
 160 Emacs executable was run from.  You can override this by setting the
 161 environment variables EMACSDATA (for the location of `etc' directory),
 162 EMACSLOADPATH (for the location of `lisp' directory) and INFOPATH (for
 163 the location of the `info' directory).
 164
 165 Emacs features which require asynchronous subprocesses that depend on
 166 multitasking do not work in the DJGPP port.  Synchronous subprocesses
 167 do work, so features such as compilation and grep run synchronously,
 168 unlike opn other platforms.
 169
 170 Version 2.0 of djgpp has two bugs that affect Emacs.  We've included
 171 corrected versions of two files from djgpp in the msdos subdirectory:
 172 is_exec.c and sigaction.c.  To work around the bugs, compile these
 173 files and link them into temacs.  Djgpp versions 2.01 and later have
 174 these bugs fixed, so upgrade if you can before building Emacs.
 175
 176 \f
 177 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
 178
 179 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
 180 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
 181 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
 182 (at your option) any later version.
 183
 184 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
 185 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
 186 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
 187 GNU General Public License for more details.
 188
 189 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
 190 along with GNU Emacs.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.