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1This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
3
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4* Process output truncated on Mac OS X (Carbon) when using pty's.
5
6There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
7Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
8leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
9
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10* Emacs crashes on Mac OS X (Carbon) after system software upgrade.
11
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12This problem seems to be now solved by Steven Tamm's patch to
13unexmacosx.c on Nov 24, 2002.
14
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15Between Mac OS X release 10.2.1 and 10.2.2 there was an incompatible
16change in the memory allocator that causes a EXC_BAD_ACCESS error near
17xrealloc(). Relinking the application (by deleting src/temacs and
18running make) will solve the problem. It appears to be caused by some
19problems with the unexec code and its interaction with libSystem.B.
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21* Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
22
23XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
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24minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
25name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
26according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
27characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
28able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
29C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
30font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
31include in the fontset spec:
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32
33mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
34mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
35mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
36
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37* The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
38
39Emacs by default only supports the parts of the Unicode BMP whose code
40points are in the ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff. This excludes: most
41of CJK, Yi and Hangul, as well as everything outside the BMP.
42
43If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
44characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
45(composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
46correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
47If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
48substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
49information.
50
51To edit such UTF data, turn on Utf-Translate-Cjk mode, which makes
52many common CJK characters available for encoding and decoding and can
53be extended by updating the tables it uses. This also allows you to
54save as UTF buffers containing characters decoded by the chinese-,
55japanese- and korean- coding systems, e.g. cut and pasted from
56elsewhere.
60f553d2 57
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58* Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
59
60When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
61graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
62and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
63file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
64
4af77d9f 65The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
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66for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
67
68Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
69but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
70the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
71
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72* Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X) running on Solaris 7 or 8.
73
74This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
75Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
76
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77* Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
78
79Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
80library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
81following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
82though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
83distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
84
85--- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
86+++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
87@@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
177c0ea7 88
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89 (mapcar
90 (lambda (x)
91- (mapcar
92- (lambda (y)
93- (mucs-define-coding-system
94- (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
95- (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
96- (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
97- (cdr x)))
98+ (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
99+ ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
100+ ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
101+ ;; system definitions.
102+ (let ((y (cadr x)))
103+ (mucs-define-coding-system
104+ (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
105+ (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
106+ (mapcar
107+ (lambda (y)
108+ (mucs-define-coding-system
109+ (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
110+ (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
111+ (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
112+ (cdr x)))
113 `((utf-8
114 (utf-8-unix
115 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
116
117Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
118Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
119
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120* Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
121
122This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
123of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
124version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
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125dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
126around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
127incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
128". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
129directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
130variables).
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131
132The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
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133`-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
134when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
135unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
136run the script like this:
137
173de997 138 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
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139
140(replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
141the script).
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142
143Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
144Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
145
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146* Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
147undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
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148
149This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
150with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
151GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
152from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
153compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
154link stage.
155
156A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
157
158 make CC=gcc
159
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160Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
161with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
162
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163* Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
164
165Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
166version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
167necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
168__MSVCRT__, like so:
169
170 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
171
172* Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
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173
174The error message might be something like this:
175
c24be289 176 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
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177 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
178 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
179 '0xffffffff'
180 Stop.
181
182This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
183which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
184`*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
185endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
186or EOL conversions.
187
188The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
189change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
190in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
191which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
192mangling them.
193
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194* Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
195
196The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
197C backtrace printed by GDB:
198
199 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
200 (gdb) where
201 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
202 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
203 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
204 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
205
206This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
207of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
208but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
209other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
210distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
211GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
212following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
213distribution:
214
cbfe0252 215 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
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216 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
217 know what's really going on here. */
218 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
219 0x10000000. */
220 #if defined __linux__
221 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
222 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
223 #endif
224 #endif
225 #endif /* 0 */
226
227Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
228the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
229should now succeed.
230
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231* JPEG images aren't displayed.
232
233This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
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234Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
235correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
236against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
9ed04369 237
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238* Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
239
240This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
241defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
242patch to assert.h should solve this:
243
244*** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
245--- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
246***************
247*** 41,47 ****
248 /*
249 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
250 */
251! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
177c0ea7 252
b87207a0 253 #else /* debugging enabled */
177c0ea7 254
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255--- 41,47 ----
256 /*
257 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
258 */
259! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
177c0ea7 260
b87207a0 261 #else /* debugging enabled */
177c0ea7 262
b87207a0 263
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264
265* Improving performance with slow X connections
266
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267There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
268be carried out at the same time:
269
2701) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
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271 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
272 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
273 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
274 package.
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275
2762) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
277 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
278
2793) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
280 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
281
2824) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
283 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
284 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
285 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
286 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
287 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate
288 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
289 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
290 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
291 For more about lbxproxy, see:
20888a62 292 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
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293
294* Getting a Meta key on the FreeBSD console
295
296By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
297FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
298current keymap to a file with the command
299
300 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
301
302Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
303definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
304key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
305to look like this
306
307 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
308
309to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
310
311 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
312
313* Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
314
315A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
316into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
317incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
318other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
319been filed.
320
321* Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font
322
323This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
3242.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
325event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
326Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
327
328A workaround for this is to add something like
329
330emacs.waitForWM: false
331
332to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
333frame's parameter list, like this:
334
335 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
336
337(this should go into your `.emacs' file).
338
339* Underlines appear at the wrong position.
340
341This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
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342Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
343neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
344problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
345`.emacs'.
346
347To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
348type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
349property.
61638355 350
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351* When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
352click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
353is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
354problem disappears.
355
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356* There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
357XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
358one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
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359For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
360"C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
361used with neXtaw at run time.
362
363The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
364want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
365built Emacs with.
ed0d1d91 366
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367* Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
368
369This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
370a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
371--without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
372
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373* Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
374
375This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
376terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
377If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
378version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
379and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
380
381All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
382problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
383terminfo when built.
384
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385* Error messages about undefined colors on X.
386
387The messages might say something like this:
388
389 Unable to load color "grey95"
390
391(typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
392
393 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
394
395These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
396many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
397resources to load all the colors it needs.
398
399A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
400
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401* Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
402
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403Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
404emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
405entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
406"Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
407supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
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408Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
409uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
410"colors".
411
412In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
413``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
414back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
415use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
416doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
417sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
418it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
419capability).
420
421Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
422attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
423incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
424this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
ed85f61d 425
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426Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
427of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
ed85f61d 428entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
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429`xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
430emulator.
ed85f61d 431
f5fdfa60 432Beginning with version 21.4, Emacs supports the --color command-line
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433option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
434modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
435for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
436
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437Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
438Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
439Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
440recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
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441global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
442`global-font-lock-mode'.
ed85f61d 443
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444* Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
445
446This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
447ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
448These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
449the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
450(show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
451blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
452cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
453always blinks.
454
455A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
456enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
457the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
458cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
459the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
460cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
461
462To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
463`linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
464the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
465produce a modified terminfo entry.
466
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467Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
468change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
469
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470* Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
471
472The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
473emulation for which it is set up.
474
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475Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
476Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
477On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
478--enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
479successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
480lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
481menu placement.
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482
483On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
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484locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
485what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
486developers.
339b95d5 487
fa99e2a4 488* Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.2.
b87207a0 489
d6cdfce6 490Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
6fb6f3ac 491is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
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492displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
493synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
494waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
495pop-up menu interaction.
f936978f 496
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497Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
498for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
499
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500There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
501mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
502frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
503after moving back into it.
b87207a0 504
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505Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
506not as severely as in 21.1.
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507
508Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
509characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
510
511An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
512Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
513
fa99e2a4 514Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.2). Some
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515of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
516in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
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517characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
518work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
519you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
520the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
521ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
522appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
523yet.)
524
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525Windows uses UTF-16 encoding to deal with multilingual text (text not
526encodable in the `system codepage') in the clipboard. To deal with
527this, load the library `utf-16' and use `set-selection-coding-system'
20888a62 528to set the clipboard coding system to `utf-16-le-with-signature-dos'.
e085efdb 529
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530The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
531month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
532of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
533library function.
fa99e2a4 534
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535* The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
536
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537There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
538by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
539default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
540
541If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
542`--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
543shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
544the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
545Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
cc305a60 546explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
c8d9b4ee 547
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548* Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
549
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550This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
551(RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
552(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
553configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
554files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
555left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
556itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
cbfe0252 557Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
d9810886 558
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559In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
560machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
561(it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
562This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
563
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564If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
565(Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
566you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
567force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
568problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
569blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
570`mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
571options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
572`/etc/auto.home'.
573
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574Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
575a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
576waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
577to work around the problem.
d9810886 578
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579Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
580onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
581you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
582`/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
583
584 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
585
586The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
587
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588* Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
589
590This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
591via NFS. Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
592binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
593
594 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
595
596We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
597build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
598
9ed04369 599* Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
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600
601Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
602other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
603that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
604size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
605when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
606fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
607
608To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
609
610 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
611
612If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
613problem.
614
615The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
616`fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
617`xset fp rehash'.
618
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619* Large file support is disabled on HP-UX. See the comments in
620src/s/hpux10.h.
621
e9a0a549 622* Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
ec6bd013 623libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
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624Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
625if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
626older version.
4e0bd469 627
4dea3d52 628* Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
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629
630By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
631`{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
632any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
633vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
634parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
635in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
cbfe0252 636pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
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637introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
638through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
639to the end of a very large buffer.
640
445f98eb 641Beginning with version 21.4, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
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642is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
643to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
644indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
473347f6 645
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646If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
647makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
648fontification by setting the variable
649`font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
650be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
651
652Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
653in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
654
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655* When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
656or messed up.
657
cbfe0252 658For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
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659empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
660background.
661
662This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
663definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
664solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
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GM
665option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
666is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
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667
668Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
669applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
670(should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
671so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
672Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
673present or commented out:
674
675 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
676 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
677 Emacs*Foreground
678 Emacs*Background
679
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680* Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
681
682Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
683MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
684port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
685keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
686of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
687
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688* Dired is very slow.
689
690This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
691time. Possible reasons for this include:
692
693 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
694 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
695
696 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
697
698 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
699
700To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
701`directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
702invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
703(c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
704
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705* Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
706
707If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
708due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
709and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
710port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
711are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
712confuses ange-ftp.
713
714The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
715(version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
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716Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
717directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
718variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
719client's executable. For example:
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720
721 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
722
723If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
724this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
725
726 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
727
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728* Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
729under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
a953a8d3 730
2ebf6139
GM
731* On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
732are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
733so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
734Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
735
cc2f2825 736* Compiling on AIX 4.3.x or 4.4 fails.
ec383c7d 737
9e2305c3 738This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
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739the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
740redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
741is to use the default compiler `cc'.
742
a14e05ac 743* Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
e1f9a6b3 744`before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
9ec9d3d2 745longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
1d297d9b 746
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747* PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
748
749PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
750as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
751of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
752sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
753HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
754(from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
755(for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
756
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757* The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
758
759It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
760Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
761please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
762argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
763
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764* The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
765
9ed04369 766This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
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767slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
768flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
769support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
770generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
224a0b4d 771
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772* Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
773
774The error message might be something like this:
775
776 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
777
778This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
779built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
780for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
781corrects that.
782
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783* ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
784
785This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
786defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
787runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
788
789The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
790
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JR
791* lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
792
793This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
794likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
795
796Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
797print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
798printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
799built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
800has):
801
802(setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
803(setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
804(setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
805(setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
806
f4f4ee4d
GM
807* On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
808from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
809shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
810These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
811library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
812
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813Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
814process invokes Emacs several times.
815
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GM
816On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
817environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
818can be found.
819
820Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
821Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
822specified run-time search path in the executable.
823
8643647c 824On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
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825linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
826backtraces like this:
827
828 (dbx) where
829 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]
830 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
831 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
832 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
833 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
834 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
835 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
836 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
837 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
838
8643647c
RS
839(`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
840happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
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841forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
842to work around the problem.
843
f4f4ee4d
GM
844Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
845
0c6456ad 846* On Solaris 2.7, building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
9b2999d0
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847C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
848compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
849release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
850another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
851and the default CFLAGS.
0c6456ad 852
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853* Compiling syntax.c with the OPENSTEP 4.2 compiler gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
854
855The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
856following message:
857
858 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
859
860To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
861INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
862functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
863
864 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
865 {
866 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
867 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
868
869Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
870with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
871
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872* Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
873
874A typical error message might be something like
875
876 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
877
878This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
879Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
880are:
881
882 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
883
884 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
885 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
886 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
887
888One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
889fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
890the problematic line(s) and correct them.
891
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892* Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
893
894The typical error message might be like this:
895
896 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
897
898This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
899tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
900files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
901Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
902when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
903required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
b75b82ab 904it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
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905
906Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
907file could fail to load if it is compressed.
908
909The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
910file.
911
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912Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
913lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
914print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
915
916 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
917
918If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
919and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
920load-path.
921
42303132
JR
922* Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
923
924An example of such an error is:
925
177c0ea7 926 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
42303132
JR
927
928This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your classpath.
929The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
930present in load-path:
931
932 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
933
934If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
935and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
936load-path.
937
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938* Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
939
940If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
941representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
f2d176f2
CW
942ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
943version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
944systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
945ftp client. On a Debian system, type
f3d6f4ee 946
f2d176f2 947 update-alternatives --config ftp
f3d6f4ee
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948
949and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
950
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951* Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
952
953The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
954work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
955was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
956work when an antivirus package is installed.
957
958The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
959mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
960or disable it entirely.
961
c34607fc 962* On MS-Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
f29d1e75
JR
963
964This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
965when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
966cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
cbfe0252 967http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
f29d1e75 968
c34607fc 969* MS-Windows 95/98/ME crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
c24be289 970
4593687f 971When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
c24be289 972Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
94e83484 973particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
5f08ab61 974program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
94e83484 975PATH.
c24be289 976
b35319bf
JR
977* Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
978
979This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
980programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
981mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
982different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
983middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
984"scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
985generic mouse driver might help.
986
987* Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
988
989This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
990generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
991movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
992scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
993
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994* Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
995mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
996exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
997seen.
998
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999* After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working.
1000
1001This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1002Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1003modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1004keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1005modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1006was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1007Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1008
1009The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1010modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1011and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1012which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1013the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1014modifier:
1015
1016 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1017
1018A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1019is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1020
1021 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1022
1023This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1024keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1025keys can serve as Meta.
1026
1027The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1028keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1029
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DL
1030* On OSF/Dec Unix/Tru64/<whatever it is this year> under X locally or
1031remotely, M-SPC acts as a `compose' key with strange results. See
1032keyboard(5).
1033
1034Changing Alt_L to Meta_L fixes it:
1035% xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L'
177c0ea7 1036% xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R'
119d3665 1037
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DL
1038* Error "conflicting types for `initstate'" compiling with GCC on Irix 6.
1039
1040Install GCC 2.95 or a newer version, and this problem should go away.
1041It is possible that this problem results from upgrading the operating
1042system without reinstalling GCC; so you could also try reinstalling
1043the same version of GCC, and telling us whether that fixes the problem.
1044
0de9f9a8
EZ
1045* Emacs dumps core on Solaris in function IMCheckWindow.
1046
1047This was reported to happen when Emacs runs with more than one frame,
1048and one of them is closed, either with "C-x 5 0" or from the window
1049manager.
1050
1051This bug was reported to Sun as
1052
1053 Gtk apps dump core in ximlocal.so.2:IMCheckIMWindow()
1054 Bug Reports: 4463537
1055
2aa82bcf 1056Installing Solaris 8 patch 108773-12 for Sparc and 108774-12 for x86
0de9f9a8
EZ
1057reportedly fixes the bug, which appears to be inside the shared
1058library xiiimp.so.
1059
1060Alternatively, you can configure Emacs with `--with-xim=no' to prevent
1061the core dump, but will loose X input method support, of course. (You
1062can use Emacs's own input methods instead, if you install Leim.)
1063
a933dad1
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1064* On Solaris 7, Emacs gets a segmentation fault when starting up using X.
1065
1066This results from Sun patch 107058-01 (SunOS 5.7: Patch for
3156909f
PE
1067assembler) if you use GCC version 2.7 or later.
1068To work around it, either install patch 106950-03 or later,
1069or uninstall patch 107058-01, or install the GNU Binutils.
a933dad1
DL
1070Then recompile Emacs, and it should work.
1071
1072* With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
1073
1074Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
1075
1076 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
1077 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
1078 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
1079 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
1080 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
1081 /******************************************************************
1082
1083 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
1084 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
1085 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
1086 XLCd lcd;
1087 {
1088 - char* begin;
1089 - char* end;
1090 + char* begin = NULL;
1091 + char* end = NULL;
1092 char* ret;
1093 int i = 0;
1094 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
1095 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
1096 }
1097 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
1098 if (ret != NULL) {
1099 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
1100 + if (begin != NULL) {
1101 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
1102 + } else {
1103 + ret[0] = '\0';
1104 + }
1105 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
1106 }
1107 return ret;
1108
1109
a933dad1 1110* Emacs crashes on Irix 6.5 on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
177c0ea7 1111
a933dad1
DL
1112This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
1113
1114* Emacs crashes in utmpname on Irix 5.3.
1115
1116This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
1117It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
1118
de121241
EZ
1119* The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1120
1121This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1122combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1123definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1124might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1125purposes.
1126
1127We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1128you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1129
a933dad1
DL
1130* On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
1131the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
1132
1133You can fix this by editing the file:
1134
1135 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
177c0ea7 1136
a933dad1
DL
1137Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
1138
1139 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1140
1141that should read:
1142
1143 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1144
1145Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
1146
1147* Emacs on Digital Unix 4.0 fails to build, giving error message
1148 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
1149
1150This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
1151Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
1152
1153* Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
1154
1155Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
1156problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
1157documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
1158
1159* Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1160
1161These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1162particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1163configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1164configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1165change this.
1166
1167* When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
1168
1169When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
1170(either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
1171then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
177c0ea7
JB
1172correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
1173gives the appearance of "double spacing".
a933dad1 1174
e9a0a549 1175To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
a933dad1
DL
1176feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
1177
a933dad1
DL
1178* Failure in unexec while dumping emacs on Digital Unix 4.0
1179
1180This problem manifests itself as an error message
1181
1182 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
1183
1184The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
1185were built for an older system version,
1186
1187 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
1188
1189made the problem go away.
1190
1191* No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
1192
1193This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
1194as of 8 Dec 1998.
1195
1196The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
1197
1198* As of version 20.4, Emacs doesn't work properly if configured for
1199the Motif toolkit and linked against the free LessTif library. The
1200next Emacs release is expected to work with LessTif.
1201
1202* Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1203
1204This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1205a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1206likely to cause it.
1207
1208We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1209
1210* Emacs makes HPUX 11.0 crash.
1211
1212This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1213
1214* Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine (HPUX 10.20).
1215
1216This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
1217
1218* The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
1219Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
1220`add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
1221'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
1222
1223* Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
1224(alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
1225Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
1226earlier versions.
1227
1228--- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
1229+++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
1230@@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
1231 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
1232 (cond
1233 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
1234- (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
1235+ (insert-file-contents entity)
1236 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
1237 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
1238 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
1239
d238f982
EZ
1240* Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUC TeX installed.
1241
1242Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUC TeX; upgrading should solve
1243these problems.
1244
d7185f9d
EZ
1245* No colors in AUC TeX with Emacs 21.
1246
1247Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
1248byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
1249
d238f982 1250* Running TeX from AUC TeX package with Emacs 20.3 gives a Lisp error
a933dad1
DL
1251about a read-only tex output buffer.
1252
1253This problem appeared for AUC TeX version 9.9j and some earlier
1254versions. Here is a patch for the file tex-buf.el in the AUC TeX
1255package.
1256
1257diff -c auctex/tex-buf.el~ auctex/tex-buf.el
1258*** auctex/tex-buf.el~ Wed Jul 29 18:35:32 1998
1259--- auctex/tex-buf.el Sat Sep 5 15:20:38 1998
1260***************
1261*** 545,551 ****
1262 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1263 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1264 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1265! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer)
1266 (set-buffer buffer)
1267 (if dir (cd dir))
1268 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1269- --- 545,552 ----
1270 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1271 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1272 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1273! (let (temp-buffer-show-function temp-buffer-show-hook)
1274! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer))
1275 (set-buffer buffer)
1276 (if dir (cd dir))
1277 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1278
1279* On Irix 6.3, substituting environment variables in file names
1280in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
1281
1282 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
1283
1284This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
1285003082 August 11, 1998.
1286
1287* After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1288
1289The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1290 (standard-display-european t)
177c0ea7 1291That should be changed to
a933dad1
DL
1292 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1293
1294* Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
1295
1296You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
1297supplies the `install-info' command.
1298
1299* Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key, on HPUX.
1300
1301To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1302rights, containing this text:
1303
1304--------------------------------
1305xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1306keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1307keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1308EOF
1309
1310xmodmap - << EOF
1311clear mod1
1312keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1313add mod1 = Meta_L
1314keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1315add mod2 = Mode_switch
1316EOF
1317--------------------------------
1318
17a37d87
EZ
1319* Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1320
62c485d2
GM
1321This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1322requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1323of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1324which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1325while, Emacs will print a message:
17a37d87
EZ
1326
1327 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1328
62c485d2 1329A workaround is to not use `klipper'.
17a37d87 1330
a933dad1
DL
1331* Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
1332in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
1333drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
1334
1335This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
1336device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
1337work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
1338
1339* M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1340
1341See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1342for character composition.
1343
1344* Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
1345
1346This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
1347full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
1348/etc/hosts file, something like this:
1349
1350127.0.0.1 localhost
1351129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
1352
1353The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
1354
1355* Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs on Digital Unix 4.0.
1356
1357So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
1358is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
1359properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
1360`tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
1361in Emacs.
1362
1363* When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
1364
3d00585e
EZ
1365This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
1366characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
1367characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
1368support for 8-bit characters.
a933dad1 1369
3d00585e
EZ
1370To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
1371this at your shell's prompt:
1372
1373 ispell -vv
1374
1375and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
1376"!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
1377does not.
1378
1379To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
1380in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
1381Then rebuild the speller.
1382
1383Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
1384version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
1385
1386Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
1387in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
1388Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
1389it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
1390spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
a933dad1 1391
7838ea1b
GM
1392If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
1393you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
1394can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
1395in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
1396
a933dad1
DL
1397* On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
13985.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1399
1400This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1401One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1402known to work.
1403
c34607fc 1404* On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
a933dad1
DL
1405CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
1406
1407This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
1408
1409Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
1410events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
1411distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
1412combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
c24be289
JR
1413AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
1414to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
a933dad1 1415
b5cb4652
EZ
1416* Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server
1417
1418If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
1419reported to prevent the crashes.
1420
c34607fc 1421* Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect
a933dad1
DL
1422
1423The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
1424screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
1425display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
1426to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
1427
e9a0a549
EZ
1428This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
1429as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
1430problem lies in the X-server settings.
a933dad1
DL
1431
1432There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
1433running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
1434un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
1435selection".
1436
1437Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
1438please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
1439If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
1440here.
1441
1442* On Solaris 2, Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
1443
1444The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
1445Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
1446(Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
1447You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
1448You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
1449look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
1450are currently recommended for your host.
1451
1452On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
1453105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
1454105284-18 might fix it again.
1455
3156909f
PE
1456* On Solaris 2.6 and 7, the Compose key does not work.
1457
1458This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
1459the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
1460support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
1461If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
a933dad1
DL
1462
1463One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
1464For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
1465variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
1466lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
1467should do.
1468
3156909f
PE
1469pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
1470if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
1471libraries.
a933dad1 1472
e96c5c69
JD
1473* Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1474
1475This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1476seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1477To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1478and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1479
a933dad1
DL
1480* Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
1481
1482You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
1483either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
1484calls for specifying this.
1485
1486If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
1487mail-host-address to the value you want.
1488
1489* Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs, on UnixWare 2.1
1490
1491Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
1492virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
1493the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
1494error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
1495exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
1496memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
1497
1498You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
1499But you have to be root to do it.
1500
1501According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
1502
1503 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
1504 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
1505 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
1506 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
1507 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
1508
1509(He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
1510These changes take effect when you reboot.
1511
1512* Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1513
1514We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1515scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1516happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1517on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1518
1519Here's how to do this:
1520
1521 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1522
1523If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1524try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1525to normal, do
1526
1527 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1528
1529* Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
1530
1531Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
1532supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
1533many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
1534
1535If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
1536server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
1537You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
1538
1539The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
1540display all the characters Emacs supports.
1541
4c635a29
DL
1542Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
1543missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
1544character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
1545but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
1546of this character to display a space.
1547
a933dad1
DL
1548* Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
1549
1550You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
1551
1552* Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
1553
1554This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
1555than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
1556lines do not overlap.
1557
1558* You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
1559video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
1560
1561This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
1562your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
1563check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
1564
1565* In FreeBSD 2.1.5, useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1566directories that have the +t bit.
1567
1568This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1569Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1570with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1571link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1572
1573If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1574file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1575
1576* When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1577commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1578
1579You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1580
1581 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1582
1583* Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
1584appear on disk.
1585
1586This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
1587remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
1588implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
1589detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
1590calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
1591where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
1592
1593* "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
1594
1595If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
1596will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
1597in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
1598did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
1599character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
1600must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
1601
1602You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
1603them to two different keys.
1604
1605* Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup, on AIX4.2.
1606
1607If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
1608without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
1609
1610* movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
1611
1612Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
1613NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
1614entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
1615listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
1616the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
1617old POP protocol.
1618
1619* Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
1620
1621This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
1622use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
1623an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
1624happens to exist on your X server).
1625
1626* Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
1627
1628This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
1629prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
1630to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
1631
1632Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
1633(src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
1634
1635* Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on HPUX 9 after you delete a frame.
1636
1637We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
1638the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
1639does not happen.
1640
1641* Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1642
1643We suspect that this is a similar bug in the X libraries provided by
1644Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1645makes the problem stop:
1646
1647105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1648105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1649106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1650105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1651
1652Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1653suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1654
1655106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1656106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1657105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1658
c34607fc 1659* Problems running Perl under Emacs on MS-Windows NT/95.
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1660
1661`perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
1662The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
1663
1664The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
1665"CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
1666with the user.
1667
1668On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
1669pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
1670communicate with the subprocess.
1671
1672On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
1673relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
1674redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
1675stdin.
1676
1677A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
1678
1679For Perl 4:
1680
1681 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
1682 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
1683 ***************
1684 *** 68,74 ****
1685 $rcfile=".perldb";
1686 }
1687 else {
1688 ! $console = "con";
1689 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1690 }
1691
1692 --- 68,74 ----
1693 $rcfile=".perldb";
1694 }
1695 else {
1696 ! $console = "";
1697 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1698 }
1699
1700
1701 For Perl 5:
1702 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
1703 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
1704 ***************
1705 *** 22,28 ****
1706 $rcfile=".perldb";
1707 }
1708 elsif (-e "con") {
1709 ! $console = "con";
1710 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1711 }
1712 else {
1713 --- 22,28 ----
1714 $rcfile=".perldb";
1715 }
1716 elsif (-e "con") {
1717 ! $console = "";
1718 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1719 }
1720 else {
1721
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1722* Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs:
1723
1724There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
1725
1726 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
1727 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
1728 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
1729
1730To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
1731subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
1732them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
1733incorrect library functions.
1734
c34607fc 1735* When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
f1e54ce1
EZ
1736
1737If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
1738Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
1739program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
1740config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
1741the front of your PATH environment variable.
1742
c34607fc 1743* When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
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1744like make-docfile.
1745
1746This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
1747variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
1748compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
1749the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
1750
1751* Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
1752run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
a01325b8
EZ
1753
1754Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
a933dad1
DL
1755immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
1756the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
a01325b8
EZ
1757and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
1758
1759Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
1760the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
1761Lisp.
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1762
1763This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
1764support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
1765characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
1766You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
1767filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
1768compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
1769explains this issue in more detail.
1770
a01325b8
EZ
1771Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
1772MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
1773by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
1774unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
1775them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
1776must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
1777properly truncated.
1778
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1779* Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
1780
1781 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
1782
1783This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
1784on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
1785value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
1786works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
1787support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
1788undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
1789[emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
1790`TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
1791your system works as before.
1792
c34607fc 1793* On MS-Windows 95, Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
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1794
1795This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
1796You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
1797
c34607fc 1798* Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
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1799
1800This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1801you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
c24be289
JR
1802and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
1803more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
1804or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
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1805
1806* `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
1807
1808This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
1809version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
1810definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
1811incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
1812does not work with this version of ncurses.
1813
1814The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
1815
287890ea 1816* Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
1dd8b979 1817
10a763e5
RS
1818If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
1819systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
1820ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
1821cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
1822libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
1823obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
1824
1825The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
1826the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
1827symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
1828it constitutes a separate package.
1dd8b979 1829
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1830* Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
1831
1832Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
1833editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
1834as GCC.
1835
1836* Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly truncated
1837on GNU/Linux systems.
1838
1839This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
18401.3.75.
1841
1842* Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1843
1844There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1845caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1846problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1847is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1848
1849Using the old library version is a workaround.
1850
1851* On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
1852
1853This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
1854version of Solaris that you are using.
1855
1856* Emacs dumps core on startup, on Solaris.
1857
1858Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
1859102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
1860Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
1861by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
1862However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
1863
1864Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
1865you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
1866We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
1867for certain.
1868
177c0ea7
JB
1869 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
1870 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
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1871 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
1872
1873(One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
1874with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
1875
1876If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
1877bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1878
1879Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
1880Solaris 2.5.
1881
1882* Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called, on Solaris.
1883
1884If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
1885of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
1886called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
1887
1888* "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes on HPUX, in
1889Emacs built with Motif.
1890
1891This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1892such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1893
1894* On Irix 6.0, make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi
1895
1896A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
1897in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
1898find that string, and take out the spaces.
1899
1900Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
1901
1902* "out of virtual swap space" on Irix 5.3
1903
1904This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
1905many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
1906swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
1907can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
1908command `swap -l'.
1909
1910You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
1911line like this:
1912
1913/usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
1914
1915where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
1916by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
1917that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
1918new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
1919information.
1920
1921The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
1922swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
1923on the network that can log on to the host.
1924
1925If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
1926the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
1927some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
1928icons.
1929
1930You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
1931FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
1932("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
1933ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
1934
1935* With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
1936character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
1937
1938One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
1939away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
1940XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
1941
1942* On SunOS 4.1.3, Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
1943
1944This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
1945on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
1946version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
1947it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
1948
1949* On SunOS 4, Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
1950(or log out, if you logged in using X).
1951
1952Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
1953
1954* On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1955with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1956
1957On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1958`unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1959Definitions" to make them defined.
1960
1961* On SunOS, you get linker errors
177c0ea7 1962 ld: Undefined symbol
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1963 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
1964 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
1965
1966The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
1967or link libXmu statically.
1968
1969* On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as
1970 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
1971 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
1972
1973This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
1974these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
1975you build Emacs:
1976
1977 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
1978 chmod 664 libIM.a
1979 ranlib libIM.a
1980
1981Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
1982Makefile).
1983
1984* Unpredictable segmentation faults on Solaris 2.3 and 2.4.
1985
1986A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
1987the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
1988
1989We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
1990
1991* Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for
c34607fc 1992MS-Windows.
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1993
1994A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
1995Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
1996problem.
1997
1998* Emacs crashes at startup on MSDOS.
1999
2000Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
2001and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
2002know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
2003memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
2004However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
2005
2006You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
2007arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
2008information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
2009is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
2010
2011Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
2012configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
2013removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
2014and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
2015the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
2016
2017* A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
2018
2019twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
2020You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
2021
2022 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
2023
2024* Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2025
2026This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2027the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2028Emacs's configure script.
2029
2030* Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2031
2032This results from a bug in GNU Sed version 2.03. To solve the
2033problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2034configure script.
2035
2036* On Sunos 4.1.1, there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
2037
2038If you get errors such as
2039
2040 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
2041 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
2042 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
2043
2044This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
2045to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
2046script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
2047make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
2048ones available when you build Emacs.
2049
2050* The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
2051other non-English HP keyboards too).
2052
2053This is because HPUX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
2054shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
2055configures the X server.
2056
2057 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
2058 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
2059 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
2060 EOF
2061
2062 xmodmap - << EOF
2063 clear mod1
2064 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
2065 add mod1 = Meta_L
2066 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
2067 add mod2 = Mode_switch
2068 EOF
2069
2070* The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
2071
2072Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
2073command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
2074Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
2075manager to use some other command. You can disable the
2076shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
2077
2078 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
2079
2080* Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
2081
2082There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
2083that replacing the mouse made it stop.
2084
2085* Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys.
2086
2087The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2088be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2089to allocate ptys reliably.
2090
2091* On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
2092
2093The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
2094Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
2095compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
2096workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
2097syms.h.
2098
2099* Slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
2100
2101People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
2102startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
2103
2104This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
2105Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
2106improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
2107networked and non-networked machines.
2108
2109Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
2110
2111** Networked Case
2112
2113First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
2114exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
2115(replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
2116
2117 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
2118
2119Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
2120lines:
2121
177c0ea7 2122 order hosts, bind
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2123 multi on
2124
2125Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
2126indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
2127database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
2128dynamically allocate ip addresses).
2129
2130** Non-Networked Case
2131
2132The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
2133However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
2134simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
2135`touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
2136file is not necessary with this approach.
2137
2138* On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
2139forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
2140
2141casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
2142after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
2143
2144 #if ThreadedX
2145 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2146 #endif
2147
2148to:
2149
2150 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
2151 #if ThreadedX
2152 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2153 #endif
2154 #endif
2155
2156Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
2157(as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
2158OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
2159Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
2160definition for your type of machine and system.
2161
2162Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
2163the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
2164Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
2165
2166For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
2167101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
2168to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
2169patch.
2170
2171However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
2172he changed
2173 #define ThreadedX YES
2174to
2175 #define ThreadedX NO
2176in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
2177`-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
2178typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
2179
2180* With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
2181 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
2182
2183This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
2184with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
2185another escape character in kermit. One user did
2186
2187 set escape-character 17
2188
2189in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
2190
2191* The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
2192
2193This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
2194
2195 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
2196
2197That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
2198do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
2199explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
2200the resource prevents the problem.
2201
2202* Emacs gets hung shortly after startup, on Sunos 4.1.3.
2203
2204We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2205one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2206
2207100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2208100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2209100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2210100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2211100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2212
2213We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2214which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2215
2216* Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
2217
2218This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
2219installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
2220specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
2221corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
2222the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
2223Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
2224files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
2225original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
2226not to work.
2227
2228The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
2229when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
2230is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
2231same directory where system header files are kept.
2232
2233* On Solaris 2.x, GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported"
2234
2235This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2236are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2237does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2238later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2239described in the Solaris FAQ
2240<http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2241to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
2242
2243* The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
2244
2245This shell command should fix it:
2246
2247 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
2248
2249* Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
2250
2251On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
2252with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
2253version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
2254C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
2255GCC.
2256
2257* On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2258
2259This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2260for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2261/usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2262
2263* You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
2264
2265On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
2266works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
2267bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
2268the Files menu).
2269
2270This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
2271due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
2272knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
2273workaround can be found.
2274
2275* Unusable default font on SCO 3.2v4.
2276
2277The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
2278that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
2279fonts, so it does not work.
2280
2281This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
2282the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
2283emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
2284that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
2285resources affect Emacs also:
2286
2287 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
2288 *Background: scoBackground
2289 *Foreground: scoForeground
2290
2291The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
2292Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
2293
2294 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
2295 Emacs*Background: white
2296 Emacs*Foreground: black
2297
2298(These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
2299suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
2300starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
2301environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
2302as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
2303/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
2304but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
2305Open Desktop display.
2306
2307These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
2308machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
2309
2310* rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
2311
2312This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
2313The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
2314
2315* Emacs is slow using X11R5 on HP/UX.
2316
2317This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2318doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2319because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2320libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2321those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2322install them and rebuild Emacs.
2323
2324* Loading fonts is very slow.
2325
2326You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
2327Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
2328directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
2329"fonts.scale".
2330
2331If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
2332font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
2333
2334With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
2335directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
2336Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
2337
2338* On AIX 3.2.4, releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2339
2340Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2341ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2342lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2343treated as control characters.
2344
2345You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2346releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2347
2348* display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2349
2350Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
177c0ea7 2351versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
a933dad1 2352cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
177c0ea7 2353This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
a933dad1 2354processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
177c0ea7
JB
2355
2356Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
a933dad1
DL
2357the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2358
2359The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2360
2361* On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2362
2363This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2364C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2365
2366* Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
2367 segmentation fault and core dump.
2368
2369This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
2370added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
2371
2372 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
2373
2374If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
2375untar it :-).
2376
2377* Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2378
2379To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2380
2381 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2382
2383and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2384
2385The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2386cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2387
2388* Link failure on IBM AIX 1.3 ptf 0013.
2389
2390There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2391the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2392workaround/fix is:
2393
2394 cd /lib
2395 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2396 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2397
2398* Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose on a Sun.
2399
2400If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
2401with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
2402the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
2403libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
2404toolkit.)
2405
2406If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
2407lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
2408X11R4, then use it in the link.
2409
2410* Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'
2411
2412This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2413Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2414Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2415where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2416
2417So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2418
2419* In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
2420
2421This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
2422smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
2423on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
2424problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
2425
2426 if ($?EMACS) then
2427 if ($EMACS == "t") then
177c0ea7 2428 unset edit
a933dad1
DL
2429 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
2430 endif
2431 endif
2432
2433* An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
2434parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
2435
2436This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
2437 emacs*Cursor: black
2438(which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
2439that isn't a color.)
2440
2441The fix is to correct your X resources.
2442
2443* Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1 using --with-x-toolkit.
2444
2445If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
2446_iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
2447-lXaw in the command that links temacs.
2448
2449This problem seems to arise only when the international language
2450extensions to X11R5 are installed.
2451
2452* Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
2453
2454This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
2455to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
2456Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
2457
2458* src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2459
2460This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2461had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.
2462
2463* Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
2464
2465If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
2466resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
2467renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
2468font.
2469
2470One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
2471your font path, like this:
2472
2473 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
2474
2475* Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
2476
2477An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
2478
2479 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
2480
2481This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
2482individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
2483want, rewrite the resource.
2484
2485To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
2486-query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
2487the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
2488
2489* --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
2490
2491On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
2492unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
2493toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
2494libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
2495unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
2496and Solaris in version 19.29.
2497
2498* `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2499
2500This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2501commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2502Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2503hand.
2504
2505* --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong on BSD/386.
2506
2507This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
2508The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
2509such as bash.
2510
2511* Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies, on Sunos 5.3.
2512
2513A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2514exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2515applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2516communicating through pipes.
2517
2518* Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2519
2520Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2521sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2522delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2523program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2524means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2525command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2526obtain the destination address.
2527
2528There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2529In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2530non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
25312.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
25324.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2533have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2534of this writing, these official versions are available:
2535
2536 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2537 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2538 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2539 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2540 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2541
2542 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2543 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2544
2545* On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs:
2546
2547 Could not load program emacs
2548 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2549 Error was: Exec format error
2550
2551or this one:
2552
2553 Could not load program .emacs
2554 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2555 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2556 Error was: Exec format error
2557
2558These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2559compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2560
2561* On AIX, you get this compiler error message:
2562
2563 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2564 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2565
2566This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2567libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2568X11Dev... with smit.
2569
2570* You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
2571
2572This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
2573Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
2574character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
2575to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
2576
2577For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
2578
2579 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
2580
2581If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
2582Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
2583xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
2584
2585* C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
2586
2587You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
2588though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
2589or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
2590
2591* Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
2592
2593These control the actions of Emacs.
2594~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
2595EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
2596"load" will search.
2597
2598If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
2599of them, then try again.
2600
2601* After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2602
2603Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2604mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2605the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2606
2607Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2608you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2609operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2610configure script) that reads:
2611#define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2612This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2613the kernel bug.
2614
2615* Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
2616directly with an X server.
2617
2618If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
2619does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
2620whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
2621followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
2622it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
2623have made the key binding correctly.
2624
2625If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
2626be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
2627server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
2628default.
2629
2630If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
2631
2632 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
2633 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
2634
2635If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
2636commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
2637are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
2638modifier bit not otherwise used.
2639
2640If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
2641keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
2642some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
2643commands show above to make them modifier keys.
2644
2645Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
2646into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
2647
2648* `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'
2649
2650On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
2651file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
2652does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
2653value is just ten seconds.
2654
2655If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
2656
2657* `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2658
2659On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2660in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2661expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2662in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2663
2664The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2665anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2666
2667I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2668going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2669Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2670in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2671
2672* On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2673
2674Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2675the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2676sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2677
2678* Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2679
2680Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2681
2682* Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
2683the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
2684* Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
2685* GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
2686
2687This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
2688libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
2689shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
2690similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
2691
2692The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
2693the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
2694
2695The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
2696installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
2697
2698On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
2699
2700If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
2701then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
2702do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
2703or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
2704that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
2705be careful not to lose the others.
2706
2707Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
2708
2709#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
2710
2711Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
2712the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
2713again to say this:
2714
2715#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
2716
2717* On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
2718
177c0ea7 2719 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
a933dad1
DL
2720
2721The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
2722
2723The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
2724
2725* Self documentation messages are garbled.
2726
2727This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
2728with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
2729corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
2730
2731* Trouble using ptys on AIX.
2732
2733People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2734Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2735
2736* Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
2737
2738christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
2739
2740The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
177c0ea7
JB
2741execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
2742tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
a933dad1
DL
2743but tty is giving it back 3.
2744
2745The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
177c0ea7 2746word:
a933dad1 2747
177c0ea7 2748if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
a933dad1
DL
2749
2750should be changed to:
2751
177c0ea7 2752if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
a933dad1
DL
2753
2754Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
2755and into .login.
2756
2757* Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
2758
2759Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
2760
2761* Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
2762* `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
2763
2764One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
2765your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
2766the environment.
2767
2768* Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
2769
2770If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
2771`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
177c0ea7 2772that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
a933dad1
DL
2773with a floating point option other than the default.
2774
2775It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
2776crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
2777However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
2778floating point option: -fsoft.
2779
2780* Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
2781
2782The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
2783arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
2784tell Emacs to compensate for this.
2785
2786I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
2787whether this problem is present on a given system.
2788
2789* Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
2790 as a concentrator.
2791
2792This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
27937 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
2794
2795* M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2796
2797This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
177c0ea7 2798version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
a933dad1
DL
2799
2800* Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
2801 terminal type.
2802
2803The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
2804environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
2805provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
2806emulates.
2807
2808Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
2809in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
2810it only if it is undefined.
2811
2812 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
2813
2814Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
2815happen in a non-login shell.
2816
2817* X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
2818
2819People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
2820not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
2821the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
2822the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
2823
2824You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
2825However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
2826you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
2827
177c0ea7 2828The easy way to do this is to put
a933dad1
DL
2829
2830 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
2831
2832in your site-init.el file.
2833
2834* Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2835
2836On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2837may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2838is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2839As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2840
2841* Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
2842
2843You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2844
2845 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2846
2847This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2848Here is how to make more of them.
2849
2850 % cd /dev
2851 % ls pty*
2852 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2853 % /etc/crpty 8
2854 # creates eight new pty's
2855
2856* Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
2857
2858This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2859Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2860
2861It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2862space available on the machine.
2863
2864On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2865subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2866for large blocks (many pages).
2867
2868* test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
2869* or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
2870* or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2871* or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs
2872
2873This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2874fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2875binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2876
2877In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2878It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2879a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2880itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2881when unpacking the shell archive.
2882
2883I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2884what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2885file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2886
2887If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2888nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2889
2890 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2891 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2892 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2893 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2894 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2895 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2896 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2897 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2898 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2899 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2900 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2901 and remake temacs.
2902 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2903
2904* temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
2905
2906This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2907files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2908space than was allocated.
2909
2910This could be caused by
2911 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2912 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2913 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2914 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2915 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2916 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2917 deleting that file.
2918 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2919 (not from the directory you expected).
2920 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2921 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2922 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2923 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2924 the space required.
2925
2926If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2927of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2928
2929But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2930of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2931problem.
2932
2933* Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
2934
2935You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
2936Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
2937will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
2938and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
2939
2940Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
2941than the corresponding .el file.
2942
2943* The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2944
2945Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2946
29471) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2948as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2949it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2950value in the man page for a.out (5).
2951
29522) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2953initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2954of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2955not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2956may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2957
2958* Compilation errors on VMS.
2959
2960You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
2961variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
2962This is not an error. Ignore it.
2963
2964VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
2965were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
2966
2967There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
2968in conditional expressions. The bug is:
2969 char c = -1, d = 1;
2970 int i;
2971
2972 i = d ? c : d;
2973The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
2974conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
2975constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
2976
2977* rmail gets error getting new mail
2978
2979rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
2980called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
2981the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
2982
2983There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
2984the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
2985`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
2986this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
2987the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
2988IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
2989SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
2990
2991If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2992prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2993you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2994`mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
2995
2996 chgrp mail movemail
2997 chmod 2755 movemail
2998
2999If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
3000prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
3001you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
3002`mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
3003make install.
3004
3005 chgrp mail movemail
3006 chmod 2755 movemail
3007
3008Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
3009installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
3010installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
3011/usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
3012mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
3013directory copy is ineffective.
3014
3015* Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
3016
3017This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
3018used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
3019away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
3020streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
3021user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
3022properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
3023input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
3024easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
3025
3026There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
3027
3028 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
3029 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
3030 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
3031
3032First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
3033they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
3034"no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
3035escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
3036and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
3037control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
3038
3039Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
3040needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
3041by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
3042rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
3043your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
3044it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
3045the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
3046problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
3047to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
3048
3049For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
3050giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
3051codes. You might as well try it.
3052
3053If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
3054through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
3055computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
3056much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
3057control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
3058you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
3059replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
3060measures can make Emacs semi-work.
3061
3062You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
3063handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
3064enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
3065now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
3066enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
3067control handling.)
3068
3069If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
3070is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
3071other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
3072and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
3073other control characters are already used by emacs.
3074
3075IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
3076Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
3077order to continue.
3078
3079If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
3080certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
3081`enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
3082automatically. Here is an example:
3083
3084(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
3085
3086If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
3087and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
3088manually.
3089
3090I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
3091assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
3092control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
3093merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
3094widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
3095use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
3096will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
3097of inferior systems.
3098
3099* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
3100
3101For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
3102control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
3103terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
3104that wants to use flow control.
3105
3106You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
3107If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
3108flow control, as described in the preceding section.
3109
3110If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
3111into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
3112shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
3113
3114* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
3115
3116Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
3117control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
3118On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
3119control on the local system.
3120
3121One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
3122(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
3123stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
3124"stty start u stop u" will do this.
3125
3126Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
3127around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
3128issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
3129
3130If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
3131M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
3132if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
3133following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
3134
3135(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
3136
3137See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
3138info.
3139
3140* Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
3141
3142This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
3143terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
3144the combination of features specified for that terminal.
3145
3146The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
3147Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
3148(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
3149terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
3150what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
3151and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
3152There are several possibilities:
3153
31541) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
3155
3156In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
3157need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
3158
31592) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
3160 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
3161 by termcap.
3162
3163This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
3164Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
3165and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
3166classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
3167Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
3168tested on many kinds of terminals.
3169
31703) The termcap entry is wrong.
3171
3172See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
3173that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
3174for certain terminals.
3175
31764) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
3177 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
3178
3179This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
3180in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
3181
3182* Output from Control-V is slow.
3183
3184On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
3185Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
3186to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
3187before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
3188the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
3189it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
3190
3191If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
3192that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
3193specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
3194concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
3195send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
3196fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
3197time as the operations really take.
3198
3199Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
3200at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
3201terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
3202operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
3203flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
3204an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
3205Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
3206cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
3207not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
3208is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
3209
3210Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
3211multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
3212termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
3213fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
3214each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
3215to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
3216`cm' string.
3217
3218You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
3219has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
3220take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
3221
3222A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
3223of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
3224
3225* Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
3226
3227The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
3228
3229 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
3230 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
3231
3232This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
3233
3234* You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
3235
3236Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
3237after a day or two.
3238
3239The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
3240the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
3241character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
3242of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
3243overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
3244to it.
3245
3246For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
3247and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
3248other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
3249but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
3250that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
3251important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
3252
3253If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
3254you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
3255 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
3256You can probably access help-command via f1.
3257
3258* Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
3259It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
3260but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
3261causes it.
3262
3263 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
3264 call in the RFS server.
3265
3266 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
3267 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
3268 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
3269 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
3270
3271 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
3272
3273 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
3274 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
3275 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
3276 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
3277 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
3278 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
3279 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
3280
3281 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
3282
3283 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3284 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
3285 retrieving revision 1.2
3286 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3287 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
3288 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
3289 ***************
3290 *** 163,169 ****
3291 /*
3292 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3293 */
3294 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
3295 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3296 else
3297 {
3298 --- 166,172 ----
3299 /*
3300 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3301 */
3302 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
3303 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3304 else
3305 {
3306
3307* Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3308
3309You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3310
3311 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3312 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3313
3314These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3315Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3316may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3317on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3318in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3319can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3320that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3321
3322As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3323you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3324can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3325should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3326array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3327 Lisp_Object *args;
3328 ...
3329 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3330putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3331 Lisp_Object *args;
3332 Lisp_Object tem;
3333 ...
3334 tem = args[i];
3335 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3336causes the problem to go away.
3337The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3338so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3339
3340* 68000 C compiler problems
3341
3342Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3343These are some that have been observed.
3344
3345** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3346This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3347if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3348
3349** "cannot reclaim" error.
3350
3351This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3352line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3353simpler expressions.
3354
3355** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3356
3357If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3358Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3359
3360struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3361
3362lose (arg)
3363 struct foo arg;
3364{
3365 test ((int *) arg.y);
3366}
3367
3368If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3369In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3370((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3371
3372This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3373of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3374
3375* C compilers lose on returning unions
3376
3377I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3378Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3379defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3380
3381This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3382of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3383
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3385Copyright 1987,88,89,93,94,95,96,97,98,1999,2001,2002
3386 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3387
3388Copying and redistribution of this file with or without modification
3389are permitted without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
3390
53854552
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3391Local variables:
3392mode: outline
3393paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3394end:
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3395
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