GNU Emacs Installation Guide for the DJGPP (a.k.a. MS-DOS) port Copyright (C) 1992, 1994, 1996-1997, 2000-2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for license conditions. The DJGPP port of GNU Emacs builds and runs on plain DOS and also on all versions of MS-Windows from version 3.X on, including Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (however, see below for issues with Windows Vista and 7). To build and install the DJGPP port, you need to have the DJGPP ports of GCC (the GNU C compiler), GNU Make, rm, mv, and sed. See the remarks in CONFIG.BAT for more information about locations and versions. The Emacs FAQ (see info/efaq) includes pointers to Internet sites where you can find the necessary utilities; search for "MS-DOS". The configuration step (see below) will test for these utilities and will refuse to continue if any of them isn't found. Bootstrapping Emacs or recompiling Lisp files in the `lisp' subdirectory using the various targets in the lisp/Makefile file requires additional utilities: `find' (from Findutils), GNU `echo' and `test' (from Sh-utils or Coreutils), `ls' and `chmod' (from Fileutils or Coreutils), `grep' (from Grep), and a port of Bash. However, you should not normally need to run lisp/Makefile, as all the Lisp files are distributed in byte-compiled form as well. As for bootstrapping itself, you will only need that if you check-out development sources from the Emacs source repository. If you are building the DJGPP version of Emacs on a DOS-like system which supports long file names (e.g. Windows 9X or Windows XP), you need to make sure that long file names are handled consistently both when you unpack the distribution and compile it. With DJGPP v2.0 or later, long file names support is by default, so you need to unpack Emacs distribution in a way that doesn't truncate the original long filenames to the DOS 8.3 namespace; the easiest way to do this is to use djtar program which comes with DJGPP, since it will behave consistently with the rest of DJGPP tools. Alternatively, you can build Emacs with LFN=n, if some of your tools don't support long file names: just ensure that LFN is set to `n' during both unpacking and compiling. (By the time you read this, you have already unpacked the Emacs distribution, but if the explanations above imply that you should have done it differently, it's safer to delete the directory tree created by the unpacking program and unpack Emacs again, than to risk running into strange problems during the build process.) It is important to understand that the runtime support of long file names by the Emacs binary is NOT affected by the LFN setting during compilation; Emacs compiled with DJGPP v2.0 or later will always support long file names on Windows no matter what was the setting of LFN at compile time. However, if you compiled with LFN disabled and want to enable LFN support after Emacs was already built, you need to make sure that the support files in the lisp, etc and info directories are called by their original long names as found in the distribution. You can do this either by renaming the files manually, or by extracting them from the original distribution archive with djtar after you set LFN=y in the environment. To unpack Emacs with djtar, type this command: djtar -x emacs.tgz (This assumes that the Emacs distribution is called `emacs.tgz' on your system.) When unpacking Emacs is done, a directory called `emacs-XX.YY' will be created, where XX.YY is the Emacs version. On plain DOS, unpacking can complain about several directories and files in the `nextstep' subdirectory of the `emacs-XX.YY' top-level directory. This is because the names of these files overflow the 67-character limit on the file-name length imposed by DOS filesystems. When prompted by `djtar' for a different name for these files, just press [Enter] to skip them: they are not needed for the DJGPP build. If you want to print international characters, install the intlfonts distribution. For this, create a directory called `fonts' under the `emacs-XX.YY' top-level directory created by unpacking emacs.tgz, chdir into the directory `emacs-XX.YY/fonts', and type this: djtar -x intlfonts.tgz To build and install Emacs, chdir to the `emacs-XX.YY' directory and type these commands: config msdos make install Running "config msdos" checks for several programs that are required to configure and build Emacs; if one of those programs is not found, CONFIG.BAT stops and prints an error message. If you have DJGPP version 2.0 or 2.01, it will complain about a program called DJECHO.EXE. These old versions of DJGPP shipped that program under the name ECHO.EXE, so you can simply copy ECHO.EXE to DJECHO.EXE and rerun CONFIG.BAT. If you have neither ECHO.EXE nor DJECHO.EXE, you should be able to find them in your djdevNNN.zip archive (where NNN is the DJGPP version number). On Windows NT and Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7, running "config msdos" might print an error message like "VDM has been already loaded". This is because those systems have a program called `redir.exe' which is incompatible with a program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to the front of your PATH environment variable. Windows Vista/7 has several bugs in its DPMI server related to memory allocation: it fails DPMI resize memory block function, and it arbitrarily limits the default amount of DPMI memory to 32MB. To work around these bugs, first configure Emacs to use the `malloc' function from the DJGPP library. To this end, run CONFIG.BAT with the "--with-system-malloc" option: config --with-system-malloc msdos make install In addition, for Windows Vista you'll need to install Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later and enlarge its DPMI memory limit by setting the value of this Registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Wow\DpmiLimit Create this key if it does not exist. The value is a DWORD; setting it to 536870912 should let Emacs use up to 512MB of memory. If you have other problems, either building Emacs or running the produced binary, look in the file etc/PROBLEMS for some known problems related to the DJGPP port (search for "MS-DOS"). To install the international fonts, chdir to the intlfonts-X.Y directory created when you unpacked the intlfonts distribution (X.Y is the version number of the fonts' distribution), and type the following command: make bdf INSTALLDIR=.. After Make finishes, you may remove the directory intlfonts-X.Y; the fonts are installed into the fonts/bdf subdirectory of the top-level Emacs directory, and that is where Emacs will look for them by default. Building Emacs creates executable files in the src and lib-src directories. Installing the DJGPP port of Emacs moves these executables to a sibling directory called bin. For example, if you build in directory C:/emacs, installing moves the executables from C:/emacs/src and C:/emacs/lib-src to the directory C:/emacs/bin, so you can then delete the subdirectories C:/emacs/src and C:/emacs/lib-src if you wish. The only subdirectories you need to keep are bin, lisp, etc and info. (If you installed intlfonts, keep the fonts directory and all its subdirectories as well.) The bin subdirectory should be added to your PATH. The msdos subdirectory includes a PIF and an icon file for Emacs which you might find useful if you run Emacs under MS Windows. Emacs on MSDOS finds the lisp, etc and info directories by looking in ../lisp, ../etc and ../info, starting from the directory where the Emacs executable was run from. You can override this by setting the environment variables EMACSDATA (for the location of `etc' directory), EMACSLOADPATH (for the location of `lisp' directory) and INFOPATH (for the location of the `info' directory). Emacs features which require asynchronous subprocesses that depend on multitasking do not work in the DJGPP port. Synchronous subprocesses do work, so features such as compilation, grep, and Ispell run synchronously, unlike on other platforms. Version 2.0 of djgpp has two bugs that affect Emacs. We've included corrected versions of two files from djgpp in the msdos subdirectory: is_exec.c and sigaction.c. To work around the bugs, compile these files and link them into temacs. Djgpp versions 2.01 and later have these bugs fixed, so upgrade if you can before building Emacs. This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see .