Fixed Drew Adams 12 Aug problem
[bpt/emacs.git] / etc / PROBLEMS
CommitLineData
5b87ad55 1Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
8cabe764 2 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
5b87ad55
GM
3 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4See the end of the file for license conditions.
5
6
a933dad1 7This file describes various problems that have been encountered
0a4dd4e4 8in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
9dc15871 9and browsing through the outline headers.
a933dad1 10
9dc15871 11* Emacs startup failures
32364f49 12
9dc15871 13** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
32364f49 14
9dc15871 15A typical error message might be something like
32364f49 16
9dc15871 17 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
984002eb 18
9dc15871
EZ
19This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
20Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
21are:
984002eb 22
9dc15871 23 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
984002eb 24
9dc15871
EZ
25 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
26 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
27 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
984002eb 28
9dc15871
EZ
29One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
30fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
31the problematic line(s) and correct them.
984002eb 32
9dc15871 33** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
984002eb 34
9dc15871
EZ
35This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
36installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
37specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
38corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
39the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
40Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
41files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
42original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
43not to work.
984002eb 44
9dc15871
EZ
45The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
46when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
47is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
48same directory where system header files are kept.
984002eb 49
9dc15871 50** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
984002eb 51
9dc15871
EZ
52If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
53systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
54ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
55cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
56libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
57obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
f16a1bf6 58
9dc15871
EZ
59The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
60the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
61symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
62it constitutes a separate package.
f16a1bf6 63
9dc15871 64** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
5b4ffca2 65
9dc15871 66The typical error message might be like this:
5b4ffca2 67
9dc15871 68 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
24efe898 69
9dc15871
EZ
70This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
71tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
72files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
73Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
74when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
75required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
76it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
24efe898 77
9dc15871
EZ
78Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
79file could fail to load if it is compressed.
24efe898 80
9dc15871
EZ
81The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
82file.
f0f62f71 83
9dc15871
EZ
84Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
85lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
86print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
f0f62f71 87
9dc15871 88 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
f0f62f71 89
9dc15871
EZ
90If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
91and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
92load-path.
fc1bfc2a 93
9dc15871 94** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
fc1bfc2a 95
9dc15871 96An example of such an error is:
fc1bfc2a 97
9dc15871 98 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
60f553d2 99
9dc15871
EZ
100This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
101The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
102present in load-path:
3f82efb4 103
9dc15871 104 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
3f82efb4 105
9dc15871
EZ
106If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
107and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
108load-path.
3f82efb4 109
9dc15871 110** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
3f82efb4 111
9dc15871 112Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
cc305a60 113
9dc15871
EZ
114 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
115 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
116 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
117 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
118 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
119 /******************************************************************
cc305a60 120
9dc15871
EZ
121 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
122 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
123 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
124 XLCd lcd;
125 {
126 - char* begin;
127 - char* end;
128 + char* begin = NULL;
129 + char* end = NULL;
130 char* ret;
131 int i = 0;
132 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
133 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
134 }
135 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
136 if (ret != NULL) {
137 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
138 + if (begin != NULL) {
139 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
140 + } else {
141 + ret[0] = '\0';
142 + }
143 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
144 }
145 return ret;
fc2938d1 146
13673952
CY
147** Emacs crashes on startup after a glibc upgrade.
148
149This is caused by a binary incompatible change to the malloc
150implementation in glibc 2.5.90-22. As a result, Emacs binaries built
151using prior versions of glibc crash when run under 2.5.90-22.
152
0a7aab83 153This problem was first seen in pre-release versions of Fedora 7, and
13673952
CY
154may be fixed in the final Fedora 7 release. To stop the crash from
155happening, first try upgrading to the newest version of glibc; if this
156does not work, rebuild Emacs with the same version of glibc that you
157will run it under. For details, see
158
159https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=239344
160
9dc15871 161* Crash bugs
fc2938d1 162
9dc15871 163** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
177c0ea7 164
9dc15871
EZ
165This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
166use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
167an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
168happens to exist on your X server).
fc2938d1 169
9dc15871 170** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
fc2938d1 171
9dc15871
EZ
172This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
173prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
174to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
2aa82bcf 175
9dc15871
EZ
176Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
177(src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
2aa82bcf 178
9dc15871
EZ
179** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
180a segmentation fault and core dump.
c93bdf05 181
9dc15871
EZ
182This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
183added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
4593687f 184
9dc15871 185 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
9272ccfc 186
9dc15871
EZ
187If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
188untar it :-).
9272ccfc 189
9dc15871
EZ
190** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
191libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
192Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
193if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
194older version.
9272ccfc 195
9dc15871 196** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
7aa70236 197
9dc15871
EZ
198This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
199terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
200If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
201version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
202and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
7aa70236 203
9dc15871
EZ
204All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
205problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
206terminfo when built.
7c22dc9d 207
9dc15871 208** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
7c22dc9d 209
9dc15871
EZ
210If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
211reported to prevent the crashes.
7c22dc9d 212
9dc15871 213** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
7c22dc9d 214
9dc15871 215It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
7c22dc9d 216
9dc15871
EZ
217This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
218the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
219flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
220necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
677e7496 221
9dc15871
EZ
222On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
223configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
677e7496 224
1437ec2b
JD
225** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes when closing a display (x-close-connection).
226
227This happens because of bugs in Gtk+. Gtk+ 2.10 seems to be OK. See bug
228http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
229
1020d879 230** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes on startup on Cygwin.
6df79155
JD
231
232A typical error message is
dc13f3f5 233 ***MEMORY-ERROR***: emacs[5172]: GSlice: failed to allocate 504 bytes
6df79155
JD
234 (alignment: 512): Function not implemented
235
236Emacs supplies its own malloc, but glib (part of Gtk+) calls memalign and on
1020d879
EZ
237Cygwin, that becomes the Cygwin supplied memalign. As malloc is not the
238Cygwin malloc, the Cygwin memalign always returns ENOSYS. A fix for this
6df79155
JD
239problem would be welcome.
240
9dc15871 241* General runtime problems
677e7496 242
9dc15871 243** Lisp problems
677e7496 244
9dc15871 245*** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
677e7496 246
9dc15871
EZ
247You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
248Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
249will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
250and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
677e7496 251
9dc15871
EZ
252Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
253than the corresponding .el file.
9ed04369 254
9dc15871 255*** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
9ed04369 256
9dc15871
EZ
257These control the actions of Emacs.
258~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
259EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
260"load" will search.
b87207a0 261
9dc15871
EZ
262If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
263of them, then try again.
b87207a0 264
9dc15871 265*** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
177c0ea7 266
9dc15871 267The error message might be something like this:
177c0ea7 268
9dc15871 269 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
177c0ea7 270
9dc15871
EZ
271This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
272built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
273for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
274corrects that.
177c0ea7 275
9dc15871 276*** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
b87207a0 277
9dc15871
EZ
278Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
279problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
280documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
61638355 281
9dc15871
EZ
282*** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
283Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
284`add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
285'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
61638355 286
9dc15871 287** Keyboard problems
a47a639f 288
9dc15871 289*** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
a47a639f 290
9dc15871
EZ
291If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
292will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
293in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
294did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
295character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
296must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
a47a639f 297
9dc15871
EZ
298You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
299them to two different keys.
a47a639f 300
9dc15871 301*** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
61638355 302
9dc15871
EZ
303You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
304though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
305or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
61638355 306
9dc15871
EZ
307*** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
308to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
61638355 309
9dc15871
EZ
310This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
311with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
312another escape character in kermit. One user did
61638355 313
9dc15871 314 set escape-character 17
61638355 315
9dc15871 316in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
61638355 317
9dc15871 318** Mailers and other helper programs
61638355 319
9dc15871 320*** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
61638355 321
9dc15871
EZ
322Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
323NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
324entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
325listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
326the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
327old POP protocol.
61638355 328
9dc15871 329*** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
61638355 330
9dc15871
EZ
331RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
332called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
333the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
61638355 334
9dc15871
EZ
335There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
336the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
337`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
338this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
339the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
340IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
341SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
61638355 342
9dc15871 343If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
9dc15871
EZ
344prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
345you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
346`mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
347make install.
61638355 348
9dc15871
EZ
349 chgrp mail movemail
350 chmod 2755 movemail
61638355 351
9dc15871
EZ
352Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
353installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
354installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
355/usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
356mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
357directory copy is ineffective.
61638355 358
9dc15871 359*** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
61638355 360
9dc15871
EZ
361This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
362The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
556a9fad 363
9dc15871 364** Problems with hostname resolution
61638355 365
9dc15871
EZ
366*** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
367the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
368*** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
20dc2215 369*** Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
49172314 370
9dc15871
EZ
371This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
372libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
373shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
374similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
96bde66b 375
9dc15871
EZ
376The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
377the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
ed0d1d91 378
9dc15871
EZ
379The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
380installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
6e1a66dc 381
9dc15871
EZ
382On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
383
384If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
385then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
386do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
387or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
388that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
389be careful not to lose the others.
6e1a66dc 390
9dc15871 391Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
3c418e54 392
9dc15871 393#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
3c418e54 394
9dc15871
EZ
395Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
396the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
397again to say this:
3c418e54 398
9dc15871 399#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
f9130829 400
9dc15871
EZ
401*** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
402
53b30c38
GM
403For example, (system-name) returns some variation on
404"localhost.localdomain", rather the name you were expecting.
405
9dc15871 406You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
53b30c38
GM
407(i.e. a name with at least one ".") either in /etc/hosts,
408/etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system calls for specifying
409this.
9dc15871
EZ
410
411If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
412mail-host-address to the value you want.
413
414** NFS and RFS
415
416*** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
417appear on disk.
418
419This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
420remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
421implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
422detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
423calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
424where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
425
426*** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
427It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
428but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
429causes it.
430
431 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
432 call in the RFS server.
433
434 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
435 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
436 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
437 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
438
439 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
440
441 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
442 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
443 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
444 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
445 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
446 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
447 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
448
449 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
450
451 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
452 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
453 retrieving revision 1.2
454 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
455 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
456 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
457 ***************
458 *** 163,169 ****
459 /*
460 * No return sent for close or fsync!
461 */
462 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
463 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
464 else
465 {
466 --- 166,172 ----
467 /*
468 * No return sent for close or fsync!
469 */
470 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
471 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
472 else
473 {
474
475** PSGML
476
477*** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
478`before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
479longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
480
481*** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
482
483PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
484as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
485of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
486sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
487HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
488(from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
489(for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
490
491*** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
492(alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
493Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
494earlier versions.
495
496--- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
497+++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
498@@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
499 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
500 (cond
501 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
502- (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
503+ (insert-file-contents entity)
504 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
505 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
506 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
507
90a02640 508** AUCTeX
9dc15871 509
90a02640
DK
510You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
511it.
9dc15871 512
90a02640
DK
513*** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
514
515Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
9dc15871
EZ
516these problems.
517
90a02640 518*** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
9dc15871
EZ
519
520Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
521byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
522
73639601
EZ
523** PCL-CVS
524
525*** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit.
526
527When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examined
528directory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous message
529from which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committed
530files. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer are
531not updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines are
532added to the top-level directory.
533
534This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS
5351.12.10 or newer to fix this problem.
536
9dc15871
EZ
537** Miscellaneous problems
538
f5578c7f
EZ
539*** Emacs uses 100% of CPU time
540
541This is a known problem with some versions of the Semantic package.
3f37e604
GM
542The solution is to upgrade Semantic to version 2.0pre4 (distributed
543with CEDET 1.0pre4) or later.
f5578c7f 544
9dc15871
EZ
545*** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
546
547This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
548with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
549corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
550
551*** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
552terminal type.
553
554The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
555environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
556provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
557emulates.
558
559Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
560in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
561it only if it is undefined.
562
563 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
564
565Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
566happen in a non-login shell.
567
568*** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
569
570This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
571smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
572on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
573problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
574
575 if ($?EMACS) then
4b1aaa8b 576 if ("$EMACS" =~ /*) then
9dc15871
EZ
577 unset edit
578 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
579 endif
580 endif
581
582*** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
583
584This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
585full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
586/etc/hosts file, something like this:
587
588127.0.0.1 localhost
589129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
590
591The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
592
593*** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
594
595If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
596representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
597ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
598version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
599systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
600ftp client. On a Debian system, type
601
602 update-alternatives --config ftp
603
604and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
605
606*** JPEG images aren't displayed.
607
608This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
609Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
610correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
611against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
612
613*** Dired is very slow.
614
615This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
616time. Possible reasons for this include:
617
618 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
619 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
620
621 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
622
623 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
624
625To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
626`directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
627invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
628(c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
629
630*** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
631under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
632
633*** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
634
635It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
636Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
637please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
638argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
639
640*** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
641
642This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
643defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
644runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
645
646The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
647
648*** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
649from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
650shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
651These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
652library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
653
654Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
655process invokes Emacs several times.
656
657On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
658environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
659can be found.
660
661Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
662Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
663specified run-time search path in the executable.
664
665On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
666linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
667backtraces like this:
668
669 (dbx) where
670 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]
671 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
672 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
673 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
674 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
675 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
676 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
677 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
678 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
679
680(`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
681happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
682forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
683to work around the problem.
684
685Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
686
687*** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
688video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
689
690This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
691your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
692check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
693
694*** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
695
696This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
697characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
698characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
699support for 8-bit characters.
700
701To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
702this at your shell's prompt:
703
704 ispell -vv
705
706and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
707"!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
708does not.
709
710To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
711in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
712Then rebuild the speller.
713
714Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
715version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
716
717Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
718in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
719Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
720it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
721spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
722
723If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
724you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
725can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
726in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
727
728* Runtime problems related to font handling
729
730** Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
731
732Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
733supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
734many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
735
736If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
737server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
738You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
f9130829 739
9dc15871 740The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
9222ba5e
EZ
741display all the characters Emacs supports. The etl-unicode collection
742of fonts (available from <URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/fonts/> and
743<URL:ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/mirror/X.Org/contrib/fonts/>) includes
744fonts that can display many Unicode characters; they can also be used
745by ps-print and ps-mule to print Unicode characters.
f9130829 746
9dc15871
EZ
747Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
748missing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur for
749character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
750but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
751of this character to display a space.
f9130829 752
9dc15871 753** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
f9130829 754
9222ba5e
EZ
755You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution
756or the etl-unicode collection (see the previous entry).
f9130829 757
9dc15871 758** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
f9130829 759
9dc15871
EZ
760This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
761than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
762lines do not overlap.
ed85f61d 763
9dc15871 764** Loading fonts is very slow.
b300fd77 765
9dc15871
EZ
766You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
767Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
768directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
769"fonts.scale".
b300fd77 770
9dc15871
EZ
771If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
772font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
ed85f61d 773
9dc15871
EZ
774With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
775directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
776Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
ed85f61d 777
9dc15871 778** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
fa2301bf 779
9dc15871
EZ
780By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
781`{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
782any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
783vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
784parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
785in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
786pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
787introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
788through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
789to the end of a very large buffer.
ed85f61d 790
bf247b6e 791Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
9dc15871
EZ
792is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
793to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
794indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
d0cf6c7d 795
9dc15871
EZ
796If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
797makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
798fontification by setting the variable
799`font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
800be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
d0cf6c7d 801
9dc15871
EZ
802Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
803in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
d0cf6c7d 804
9dc15871
EZ
805** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
806character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
d0cf6c7d 807
9dc15871
EZ
808One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
809away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
810XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
c289e7f0 811
9dc15871 812** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
339b95d5 813
9dc15871
EZ
814This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
815For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
816with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
817the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
818fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
819Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
820and then start the application again.
821If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
822application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
823of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
824sufficient to recompile Qt.
339b95d5 825
9dc15871 826** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
339b95d5 827
9dc15871
EZ
828This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
8292.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
830event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
831Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
339b95d5 832
9dc15871 833A workaround for this is to add something like
b87207a0 834
9dc15871 835emacs.waitForWM: false
f936978f 836
9dc15871
EZ
837to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
838frame's parameter list, like this:
6fb6f3ac 839
9dc15871 840 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
b87207a0 841
9dc15871 842(this should go into your `.emacs' file).
b87207a0 843
9dc15871 844** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
b87207a0 845
9dc15871
EZ
846This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
847Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
848neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
849problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
850`.emacs'.
b87207a0 851
9dc15871
EZ
852To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
853type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
854property.
e085efdb 855
9dc15871 856** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
fa99e2a4 857
9dc15871
EZ
858When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
859(either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
860then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
861correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
862gives the appearance of "double spacing".
c8d9b4ee 863
9dc15871
EZ
864To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
865feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
fe445893 866
706475a9
GM
867** Subscript/superscript text in TeX is hard to read.
868
869tex-mode displays subscript/superscript text in the faces
870subscript/superscript, which are smaller than the normal font and
871lowered/raised. With some fonts, nested superscripts (say) can be
872hard to read. Switching to a different font, or changing your
873antialiasing setting (on an LCD screen), can both make the problem
874disappear. Alternatively, customize the subscript and superscript
875faces to increase their height.
876
9dc15871 877* Internationalization problems
c8d9b4ee 878
de25ebb8
RS
879** M-{ does not work on a Spanish PC keyboard.
880
881Many Spanish keyboards seem to ignore that combination. Emacs can't
882do anything about it.
883
9dc15871 884** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
d9810886 885
9dc15871
EZ
886XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
887minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
888name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
889according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
890characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
891able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
892C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
893font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
894include in the fontset spec:
d9810886 895
9dc15871
EZ
896mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
897mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
898mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
d04b2e49 899
9dc15871 900** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
d9810886 901
ce9b56fe
KH
902Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in the
903ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts of
904CJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets:
905
906 GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601
907
908The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on by
909default). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacs
910charset is decided by the current language environment. For instance,
911in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312.
d9810886 912
9dc15871
EZ
913If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
914characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
915(composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
916correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
917If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
918substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
919information.
aa99760e 920
9dc15871 921** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
aa99760e 922
9dc15871
EZ
923Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
924library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
925following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
926though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
927distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
086b25d3 928
9dc15871
EZ
929--- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
930+++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
931@@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
086b25d3 932
9dc15871
EZ
933 (mapcar
934 (lambda (x)
935- (mapcar
936- (lambda (y)
937- (mucs-define-coding-system
938- (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
939- (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
940- (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
941- (cdr x)))
942+ (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
943+ ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
944+ ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
945+ ;; system definitions.
946+ (let ((y (cadr x)))
947+ (mucs-define-coding-system
948+ (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
949+ (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
950+ (mapcar
951+ (lambda (y)
952+ (mucs-define-coding-system
953+ (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
954+ (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
955+ (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
956+ (cdr x)))
957 `((utf-8
958 (utf-8-unix
959 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
086b25d3 960
9dc15871
EZ
961Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
962Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
086b25d3 963
d87ceee0
KH
964** Mule-UCS compilation problem.
965
966Emacs of old versions and XEmacs byte-compile the form `(progn progn
967...)' the same way as `(progn ...)', but Emacs of version 21.3 and the
968later process that form just as interpreter does, that is, as `progn'
969variable reference. Apply the following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 to
970make it compiled by the latest Emacs.
971
972--- mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 00:42:23 -0000 1.1.1.1
973+++ mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 01:31:51 -0000 1.3
974@@ -639,10 +639,14 @@
975 (mucs-notify-embedment 'mucs-ccl-required name)
976 (setq ccl-pgm-list (cdr ccl-pgm-list)))
977 ; (message "MCCLREGFIN:%S" result)
978- `(progn
979- (setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
980- (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
981- ,@result)))
982+ ;; The only way the function is used in this package is included
983+ ;; in `mucs-package-definition-end-hook' value, where it must
984+ ;; return (possibly empty) *list* of forms. Do this. Do not rely
ade79051 985+ ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)'
d87ceee0
KH
986+ ;; form.
987+ `((setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
988+ (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
989+ ,@result)))
ade79051 990
d87ceee0
KH
991 ;;; Add hook for embedding translation informations to a package.
992 (add-hook 'mucs-package-definition-end-hook
993
9dc15871 994** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
d6b7de9b
EZ
995
996Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
997other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
998that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
999size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
1000when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
1001fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
1002
1003To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
1004
1005 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
1006
1007If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
1008problem.
1009
1010The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
1011`fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
1012`xset fp rehash'.
1013
9dc15871 1014** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
b87207a0 1015
9dc15871
EZ
1016This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
1017slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
1018flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
1019support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
1020generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
b87207a0 1021
9dc15871 1022** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
4e0bd469 1023
9dc15871
EZ
1024The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1025 (standard-display-european t)
1026That should be changed to
1027 (standard-display-european 1 t)
4e0bd469 1028
9dc15871 1029* X runtime problems
4e0bd469 1030
9dc15871 1031** X keyboard problems
4e0bd469 1032
9dc15871 1033*** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
4e0bd469 1034
9dc15871
EZ
1035This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
1036Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
1037character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
1038to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
4e0bd469 1039
9dc15871 1040For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
61638355 1041
9dc15871 1042 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
61638355 1043
9dc15871
EZ
1044If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
1045Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
1046xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
61638355 1047
9dc15871 1048*** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
61638355 1049
9dc15871 1050Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
61638355 1051
9f4f9273 1052*** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method).
09352e8f
RS
1053
1054Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program
1055which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users
1056from using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'.
1057
1058One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' file
1059which can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory.
1060However, that requires root access.
1061
1062Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources.
1063
1064Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.
1065
2fb18d13
KH
1066The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx
1067(Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. If
1068you want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitx
1069by another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or be
1070accustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'.
1071
9dc15871 1072*** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
61638355 1073
9dc15871
EZ
1074See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1075for character composition.
a953a8d3 1076
9dc15871 1077*** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
2ebf6139 1078
9dc15871
EZ
1079This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1080combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1081definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1082might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1083purposes.
ec383c7d 1084
9dc15871
EZ
1085We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1086you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
cc2f2825 1087
9dc15871 1088*** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1d297d9b 1089
9dc15871
EZ
1090These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1091particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1092configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1093configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1094change this.
8bd90f0a 1095
9dc15871 1096*** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
8bd90f0a 1097
9dc15871
EZ
1098This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
1099a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
1100--without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
8f4df059 1101
9dc15871
EZ
1102*** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
1103directly with an X server.
8f4df059 1104
9dc15871
EZ
1105If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
1106does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
1107whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
1108followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
1109it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
1110have made the key binding correctly.
b098c23c 1111
9dc15871
EZ
1112If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
1113be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
1114server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
1115default.
224a0b4d 1116
9dc15871 1117If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
6343352f 1118
9dc15871
EZ
1119 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
1120 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
6343352f 1121
9dc15871
EZ
1122If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1123commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1124are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1125modifier bit not otherwise used.
6343352f 1126
9dc15871
EZ
1127If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1128keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1129some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1130commands show above to make them modifier keys.
6343352f 1131
9dc15871
EZ
1132Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1133into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
cc2f2825 1134
9dc15871 1135** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
cc2f2825 1136
0e71e4a8
CY
1137*** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM.
1138
1139This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later
1140is running. If gnome-settings-daemon is not running, Emacs receives
1141input through XIM without any problem. Furthermore, this seems only
1142to happen in *.UTF-8 locales; zh_CN.GB2312 and zh_CN.GBK locales, for
1143example, work fine. A bug report has been filed in the Gnome
1144bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357032
1145
9dc15871 1146*** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
cc2f2825 1147
9dc15871
EZ
1148A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1149into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1150incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1151other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1152been filed.
1f42cc71 1153
9dc15871
EZ
1154*** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1155or messed up.
1f42cc71 1156
9dc15871
EZ
1157For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1158empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1159background.
1f42cc71 1160
9dc15871
EZ
1161This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1162definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1163solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1164option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1165is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1f42cc71 1166
9dc15871
EZ
1167Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1168applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1169(should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1170so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1171Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1172present or commented out:
f4f4ee4d 1173
9dc15871
EZ
1174 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1175 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1176 Emacs*Foreground
1177 Emacs*Background
0cb26e21 1178
f6021509
JD
1179It is also reported that a bug in the gtk-engines-qt engine can cause this if
1180Emacs is compiled with Gtk+.
1181The bug is fixed in version 0.7 or newer of gtk-engines-qt.
1182
9dc15871 1183*** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
f4f4ee4d 1184
9dc15871
EZ
1185This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1186requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
8576f724 1187of klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections,
9dc15871 1188which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
b11e8823 1189while, Emacs may print a message:
f4f4ee4d 1190
9dc15871 1191 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
c31138a1 1192
b11e8823
JD
1193A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
1194comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
c31138a1 1195
9dc15871 1196*** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
c31138a1 1197
9dc15871
EZ
1198This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1199seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1200To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1201and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
f4f4ee4d 1202
9dc15871
EZ
1203*** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1204click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1205is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1206problem disappears.
0c6456ad 1207
9dc15871
EZ
1208*** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1209XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1210one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1211For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1212"C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1213used with neXtaw at run time.
b1739b51 1214
9dc15871
EZ
1215The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1216want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1217built Emacs with.
b1739b51 1218
9dc15871 1219*** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
b1739b51 1220
9dc15871
EZ
1221When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1222graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1223and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1224file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
b1739b51 1225
9dc15871
EZ
1226The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1227for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
b1739b51 1228
9dc15871
EZ
1229Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1230but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1231the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
b1739b51 1232
9dc15871 1233*** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
e9a52cfe 1234
9dc15871
EZ
1235The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1236emulation for which it is set up.
e9a52cfe 1237
9dc15871 1238Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
880ea925 1239LessTif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
9dc15871
EZ
1240On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1241--enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1242successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1243lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1244menu placement.
e9a52cfe 1245
9dc15871
EZ
1246On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1247locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1248what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1249developers.
e9a52cfe 1250
9dc15871 1251*** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
e9a52cfe 1252
9dc15871 1253This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
e9a52cfe 1254
9dc15871 1255 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
e9a52cfe 1256
9dc15871
EZ
1257That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1258do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1259explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1260the resource prevents the problem.
f25eb4f7 1261
9dc15871 1262** General X problems
f25eb4f7 1263
9dc15871 1264*** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
f25eb4f7 1265
9dc15871
EZ
1266We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1267scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1268happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1269on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
f25eb4f7 1270
9dc15871 1271Here's how to do this:
f25eb4f7 1272
9dc15871 1273 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
f25eb4f7 1274
9dc15871
EZ
1275If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1276try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1277to normal, do
edd7d3be 1278
9dc15871 1279 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
edd7d3be 1280
9dc15871 1281*** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
edd7d3be 1282
9dc15871 1283The messages might say something like this:
42303132 1284
9dc15871 1285 Unable to load color "grey95"
42303132 1286
9dc15871 1287(typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
42303132 1288
9dc15871 1289 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
42303132 1290
9dc15871
EZ
1291These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1292many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1293resources to load all the colors it needs.
42303132 1294
9dc15871 1295A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
42303132 1296
9257b627
EZ
1297"undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the
1298X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where
1299X expects to find it.
1300
9dc15871 1301*** Improving performance with slow X connections.
f3d6f4ee 1302
9dc15871
EZ
1303There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1304be carried out at the same time:
f3d6f4ee 1305
9dc15871
EZ
13061) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1307 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1308 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1309 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1310 package.
f3d6f4ee 1311
9dc15871 13122) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
634e516b
EZ
1313 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the
1314 following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only
1315 after the the initial frame is displayed:
1316
1317 (scroll-bar-mode -1)
1318 (menu-bar-mode -1)
1319 (tool-bar-mode -1)
1320
1321 For still quicker startup, put these X resources in your .Xdefaults
1322 file:
1323
1324 Emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
1325 Emacs.menuBar: off
1326 Emacs.toolBar: off
f3d6f4ee 1327
9dc15871
EZ
13283) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1329 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
9f83d8b3 1330
9dc15871
EZ
13314) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1332 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1333 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1334 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1335 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
880ea925 1336 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a separate
9dc15871
EZ
1337 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1338 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1339 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1340 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1341 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
9f83d8b3 1342
34431988
KS
13435) If copying and killing is slow, try to disable the interaction with the
1344 native system's clipboard by adding these lines to your .emacs file:
1345 (setq interprogram-cut-function nil)
1346 (setq interprogram-paste-function nil)
1347
9dc15871 1348*** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
9f83d8b3 1349
9dc15871
EZ
1350This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1351a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1352likely to cause it.
f29d1e75 1353
9dc15871 1354We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
f29d1e75 1355
9dc15871 1356*** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
c24be289 1357
9dc15871
EZ
1358There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1359that replacing the mouse made it stop.
c24be289 1360
9dc15871 1361*** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
b35319bf 1362
9dc15871
EZ
1363On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1364works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1365bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1366the Files menu).
b35319bf 1367
9dc15871
EZ
1368This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1369due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1370knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1371workaround can be found.
b35319bf 1372
9dc15871
EZ
1373*** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1374parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
b35319bf 1375
9dc15871
EZ
1376This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1377 emacs*Cursor: black
1378(which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1379that isn't a color.)
787994b7 1380
9dc15871 1381The fix is to correct your X resources.
0a2eeca1 1382
9dc15871 1383*** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
0a2eeca1 1384
9dc15871
EZ
1385If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1386resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1387renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1388font.
0a2eeca1 1389
9dc15871
EZ
1390One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1391your font path, like this:
0a2eeca1 1392
9dc15871 1393 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
0a2eeca1 1394
9dc15871 1395*** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
0a2eeca1 1396
9dc15871 1397An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
0a2eeca1 1398
9dc15871 1399 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
0a2eeca1 1400
9dc15871
EZ
1401This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1402individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1403want, rewrite the resource.
119d3665 1404
9dc15871
EZ
1405To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1406-query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1407the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
119d3665 1408
9dc15871
EZ
1409*** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1410*** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
0de9f9a8 1411
9dc15871
EZ
1412One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1413your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1414the environment.
0de9f9a8 1415
9dc15871 1416*** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
0de9f9a8 1417
9dc15871
EZ
1418The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1419arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1420tell Emacs to compensate for this.
0de9f9a8 1421
9dc15871
EZ
1422I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1423whether this problem is present on a given system.
0de9f9a8 1424
9dc15871 1425*** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
0de9f9a8 1426
9dc15871
EZ
1427People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1428not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1429the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1430the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
a933dad1 1431
9dc15871
EZ
1432You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1433However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1434you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
a933dad1 1435
9dc15871 1436The easy way to do this is to put
a933dad1 1437
9dc15871 1438 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
a933dad1 1439
9dc15871 1440in your site-init.el file.
a933dad1 1441
880ea925 1442* Runtime problems on character terminals
a933dad1 1443
9dc15871 1444** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
a933dad1 1445
9dc15871
EZ
1446This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1447used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1448away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1449streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1450user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1451properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1452input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1453easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
177c0ea7 1454
9dc15871 1455There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
a933dad1 1456
9dc15871
EZ
1457 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1458 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1459 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
a933dad1 1460
9dc15871
EZ
1461First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1462they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1463"no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
1464escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1465and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1466control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
a933dad1 1467
9dc15871
EZ
1468Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1469needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1470by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1471rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1472your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1473it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1474the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1475problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1476to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
de121241 1477
9dc15871
EZ
1478For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1479giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1480codes. You might as well try it.
de121241 1481
9dc15871
EZ
1482If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1483through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1484computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1485much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1486control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1487you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1488replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1489measures can make Emacs semi-work.
de121241 1490
9dc15871
EZ
1491You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1492handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1493enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1494now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1495enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1496control handling.)
a933dad1 1497
9dc15871
EZ
1498If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1499is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1500other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1501and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1502other control characters are already used by emacs.
a933dad1 1503
9dc15871
EZ
1504IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1505Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1506order to continue.
177c0ea7 1507
9dc15871
EZ
1508If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1509certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1510`enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1511automatically. Here is an example:
a933dad1 1512
9dc15871 1513(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
a933dad1 1514
9dc15871
EZ
1515If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1516and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1517manually.
a933dad1 1518
9dc15871
EZ
1519I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1520assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1521control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1522merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1523widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1524use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1525will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1526of inferior systems.
a933dad1 1527
9dc15871 1528** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
a933dad1 1529
9dc15871
EZ
1530For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1531control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1532terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1533that wants to use flow control.
a933dad1 1534
9dc15871
EZ
1535You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1536If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1537flow control, as described in the preceding section.
a933dad1 1538
9dc15871
EZ
1539If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1540into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1541shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
a933dad1 1542
9dc15871 1543** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
a933dad1 1544
9dc15871
EZ
1545This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1546terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1547the combination of features specified for that terminal.
a933dad1 1548
9dc15871
EZ
1549The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1550Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1551(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1552terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1553what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1554and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1555There are several possibilities:
a933dad1 1556
9dc15871 15571) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
a933dad1 1558
9dc15871
EZ
1559In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1560need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
a933dad1 1561
9dc15871
EZ
15622) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1563 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1564 by termcap.
a933dad1 1565
9dc15871
EZ
1566This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1567Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1568and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1569classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1570Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1571tested on many kinds of terminals.
a933dad1 1572
9dc15871 15733) The termcap entry is wrong.
a933dad1 1574
9dc15871
EZ
1575See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1576that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1577for certain terminals.
a933dad1 1578
9dc15871
EZ
15794) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1580 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
a933dad1 1581
9dc15871
EZ
1582This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1583in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
a933dad1 1584
9dc15871 1585** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
a933dad1 1586
9dc15871
EZ
1587Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1588control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1589On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1590control on the local system.
a933dad1 1591
9dc15871
EZ
1592One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1593(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1594stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1595"stty start u stop u" will do this.
a933dad1 1596
9dc15871
EZ
1597Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1598around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1599issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
a933dad1 1600
9dc15871
EZ
1601If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1602M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1603if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1604following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
a933dad1 1605
9dc15871 1606(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
a933dad1 1607
9dc15871
EZ
1608See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1609info.
a933dad1 1610
9dc15871 1611** Output from Control-V is slow.
a933dad1 1612
9dc15871
EZ
1613On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1614Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1615to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1616before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1617the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1618it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
a933dad1 1619
9dc15871
EZ
1620If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1621that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1622specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1623concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1624send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1625fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1626time as the operations really take.
a933dad1 1627
9dc15871
EZ
1628Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1629at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1630terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1631operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1632flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1633an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1634Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1635cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1636not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1637is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
a933dad1 1638
9dc15871
EZ
1639Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1640multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1641termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1642fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1643each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1644to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1645`cm' string.
a933dad1 1646
9dc15871
EZ
1647You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1648has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1649take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
a933dad1 1650
9dc15871
EZ
1651A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1652of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
a933dad1 1653
9dc15871 1654** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
a933dad1 1655
9dc15871
EZ
1656Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1657after a day or two.
d238f982 1658
9dc15871
EZ
1659The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1660the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1661character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1662of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1663overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1664to it.
d238f982 1665
9dc15871
EZ
1666For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1667and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1668other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1669but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1670that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1671important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
d7185f9d 1672
9dc15871
EZ
1673If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1674you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1675 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1676You can probably access help-command via f1.
d7185f9d 1677
9dc15871 1678** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
a933dad1 1679
9dc15871
EZ
1680Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1681emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1682entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1683"Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1684supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1685Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1686uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1687"colors".
a933dad1 1688
9dc15871
EZ
1689In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1690``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1691back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1692use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1693doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1694sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1695it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1696capability).
a933dad1 1697
9dc15871
EZ
1698Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1699attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1700incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1701this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
a933dad1 1702
9dc15871
EZ
1703Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1704of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1705entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1706`xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1707emulator.
a933dad1 1708
bf247b6e 1709Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line
9dc15871
EZ
1710option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1711modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1712for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
a933dad1 1713
9dc15871
EZ
1714Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1715Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1716Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1717recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1718global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1719`global-font-lock-mode'.
a933dad1 1720
9dc15871 1721* Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
a933dad1 1722
9dc15871 1723** GNU/Linux
a933dad1 1724
f77e4514
KS
1725*** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted.
1726
1727There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs to
1728read corrupted process output.
1729
1730*** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption.
1731
1732If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupted
1733due to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc.
1734
1735To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it
1736executable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name of
1737the script:
1738
1739#!/bin/bash
1740exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
1741exec ssh "$@"
1742
9dc15871
EZ
1743*** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
17445.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
a933dad1 1745
9dc15871
EZ
1746This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1747One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1748known to work.
a933dad1 1749
9dc15871
EZ
1750*** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1751the Meta key stops working.
a933dad1 1752
9dc15871
EZ
1753This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1754Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1755modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1756keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1757modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1758was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1759Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
a933dad1 1760
9dc15871
EZ
1761The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1762modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1763and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1764which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1765the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1766modifier:
a933dad1 1767
9dc15871 1768 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
17a37d87 1769
9dc15871
EZ
1770A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1771is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
17a37d87 1772
9dc15871 1773 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
17a37d87 1774
9dc15871
EZ
1775This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1776keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1777keys can serve as Meta.
17a37d87 1778
9dc15871
EZ
1779The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1780keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
a933dad1 1781
ff3e9dbc 1782*** GNU/Linux: slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
a933dad1 1783
9dc15871
EZ
1784People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1785startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
a933dad1 1786
9dc15871
EZ
1787This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1788Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1789improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1790networked and non-networked machines.
a933dad1 1791
9dc15871 1792Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
a933dad1 1793
9dc15871 1794**** Networked Case.
a933dad1 1795
9dc15871
EZ
1796First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1797exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1798(replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
a933dad1 1799
9dc15871 1800 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
a933dad1 1801
9dc15871
EZ
1802Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1803lines:
a933dad1 1804
9dc15871
EZ
1805 order hosts, bind
1806 multi on
a933dad1 1807
9dc15871
EZ
1808Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1809indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1810database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1811dynamically allocate ip addresses).
a933dad1 1812
9dc15871 1813**** Non-Networked Case.
a933dad1 1814
9dc15871
EZ
1815The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1816However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1817simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1818`touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1819file is not necessary with this approach.
3d00585e 1820
9dc15871 1821*** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
3d00585e 1822
9dc15871
EZ
1823This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1824ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1825These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1826the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1827(show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1828blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1829cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1830always blinks.
3d00585e 1831
9dc15871
EZ
1832A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1833enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1834the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1835cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1836the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1837cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
3d00585e 1838
9dc15871
EZ
1839To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1840`linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1841the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1842produce a modified terminfo entry.
3d00585e 1843
9dc15871
EZ
1844Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1845change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
a933dad1 1846
9dc15871 1847*** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
7838ea1b 1848
9dc15871
EZ
1849There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1850caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1851problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1852is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
a933dad1 1853
9dc15871 1854Using the old library version is a workaround.
a933dad1 1855
9dc15871 1856** Mac OS X
a933dad1 1857
9dc15871 1858*** Mac OS X (Carbon): Environment Variables from dotfiles are ignored.
a933dad1 1859
9dc15871
EZ
1860When starting Emacs from the Dock or the Finder on Mac OS X, the
1861environment variables that are set up in dotfiles, such as .cshrc or
1862.profile, are ignored. This is because the Finder and Dock are not
1863started from a shell, but instead from the Window Manager itself.
a933dad1 1864
9dc15871
EZ
1865The workaround for this is to create a .MacOSX/environment.plist file to
1866setup these environment variables. These environment variables will
1867apply to all processes regardless of where they are started.
1868For me information, see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html.
b5cb4652 1869
9dc15871 1870*** Mac OS X (Carbon): Process output truncated when using ptys.
b5cb4652 1871
9dc15871
EZ
1872There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
1873Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
1874leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
a933dad1 1875
a186cc54
YM
1876*** Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Carbon): QuickTime updater breaks build.
1877
1878Some QuickTime updaters such as 7.0.4 and 7.2.0 are known to break
1879build at the link stage with the message like "Undefined symbols:
1880_HICopyAccessibilityActionDescription referenced from QuickTime
1881expected to be defined in Carbon". A workaround is to use a QuickTime
1882reinstaller. Alternatively, you can link with the frameworks in the
1883corresponding SDK by specifying LDFLAGS as
1884"-Wl,-F/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.3.0.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks".
e9452469 1885
9dc15871 1886** FreeBSD
a933dad1 1887
9dc15871
EZ
1888*** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1889directories that have the +t bit.
a933dad1 1890
9dc15871
EZ
1891This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1892Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1893with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1894link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
a933dad1 1895
9dc15871
EZ
1896If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1897file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
a933dad1 1898
9dc15871 1899*** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
a933dad1 1900
9dc15871
EZ
1901By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1902FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1903current keymap to a file with the command
a933dad1 1904
9dc15871 1905 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
a933dad1 1906
9dc15871
EZ
1907Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1908definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1909key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1910to look like this
3156909f 1911
9dc15871 1912 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
a933dad1 1913
9dc15871 1914to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
a933dad1 1915
9dc15871 1916 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
a933dad1 1917
9dc15871 1918** HP-UX
e96c5c69 1919
9dc15871 1920*** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
e96c5c69 1921
9dc15871 1922christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
a933dad1 1923
9dc15871
EZ
1924The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1925execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1926tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1927but tty is giving it back 3.
a933dad1 1928
9dc15871
EZ
1929The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1930word:
a933dad1 1931
9dc15871 1932if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
a933dad1 1933
9dc15871 1934should be changed to:
a933dad1 1935
9dc15871 1936if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
a933dad1 1937
9dc15871
EZ
1938Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1939and into .login.
a933dad1 1940
9dc15871 1941*** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
a933dad1 1942
9dc15871
EZ
1943On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1944file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1945does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1946value is just ten seconds.
a933dad1 1947
9dc15871 1948If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
a933dad1 1949
9dc15871
EZ
1950*** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1951other non-English HP keyboards too).
a933dad1 1952
9dc15871
EZ
1953This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1954shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1955configures the X server.
a933dad1 1956
9dc15871
EZ
1957 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1958 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1959 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1960 EOF
a933dad1 1961
9dc15871
EZ
1962 xmodmap - << EOF
1963 clear mod1
1964 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1965 add mod1 = Meta_L
1966 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1967 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1968 EOF
a933dad1 1969
9dc15871
EZ
1970*** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1971Emacs built with Motif.
a933dad1 1972
9dc15871
EZ
1973This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1974such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
a933dad1 1975
9dc15871 1976*** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
a933dad1 1977
9dc15871
EZ
1978To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1979rights, containing this text:
4c635a29 1980
9dc15871
EZ
1981--------------------------------
1982xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1983keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1984keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1985EOF
a933dad1 1986
9dc15871
EZ
1987xmodmap - << EOF
1988clear mod1
1989keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1990add mod1 = Meta_L
1991keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1992add mod2 = Mode_switch
1993EOF
1994--------------------------------
a933dad1 1995
9dc15871 1996*** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
a933dad1 1997
9dc15871 1998This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
a933dad1 1999
9dc15871 2000** AIX
a933dad1 2001
9dc15871 2002*** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
a933dad1 2003
9dc15871
EZ
2004People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2005Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
a933dad1 2006
9dc15871 2007*** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
a933dad1 2008
9dc15871 2009The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
a933dad1 2010
9dc15871
EZ
2011 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
2012 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
a933dad1 2013
9dc15871 2014This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
a933dad1 2015
9dc15871
EZ
2016*** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
2017are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
2018so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
2019Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
a933dad1 2020
9dc15871 2021*** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
a933dad1 2022
9dc15871
EZ
2023This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
2024the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
2025redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
2026is to use the default compiler `cc'.
a933dad1 2027
9dc15871
EZ
2028*** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
2029with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
a933dad1 2030
9dc15871
EZ
2031On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
2032`unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
2033Definitions" to make them defined.
a933dad1 2034
9dc15871 2035** Solaris
a933dad1 2036
9dc15871
EZ
2037We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
2038section on legacy systems.
a933dad1 2039
9dc15871 2040*** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
a933dad1 2041
9dc15871
EZ
2042This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2043C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
a933dad1 2044
9dc15871 2045*** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
a933dad1 2046
9dc15871
EZ
2047On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2048may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2049is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2050As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
a933dad1 2051
0a4dd4e4 2052*** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
a933dad1 2053
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2054We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
2055Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
2056makes the problem stop:
a933dad1 2057
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2058105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
2059105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
2060106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
2061105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
a933dad1 2062
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2063Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
2064suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
a933dad1 2065
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2066106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
2067106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
2068105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
a933dad1 2069
0a4dd4e4 2070*** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
a933dad1 2071
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2072This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
2073Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
a933dad1 2074
9dc15871
EZ
2075*** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
2076commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
a933dad1 2077
9dc15871 2078You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
a933dad1 2079
9dc15871 2080 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
a933dad1 2081
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2082*** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
2083the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
a933dad1 2084
0a4dd4e4 2085You can fix this by editing the file:
a933dad1 2086
0a4dd4e4 2087 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
a01325b8 2088
0a4dd4e4 2089Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
a933dad1 2090
0a4dd4e4 2091 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
a933dad1 2092
0a4dd4e4 2093that should read:
a933dad1 2094
0a4dd4e4 2095 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
a933dad1 2096
0a4dd4e4 2097Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
a933dad1 2098
ff31fb95
CY
2099*** On Solaris, Emacs fails to set menu-bar-update-hook on startup, with error
2100"Error in menu-bar-update-hook: (error Point before start of properties)".
2101This seems to be a GCC optimization bug that occurs for GCC 4.1.2 (-g
2102and -g -O2) and GCC 4.2.3 (-g -O and -g -O2). You can fix this by
2103compiling with GCC 4.2.3 or CC 5.7, with no optimizations.
2104
0a4dd4e4 2105** Irix
a933dad1 2106
9dc15871 2107*** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
a933dad1 2108
9dc15871 2109This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
a933dad1 2110
0a4dd4e4 2111*** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
a933dad1 2112
9dc15871
EZ
2113The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2114be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2115to allocate ptys reliably.
a933dad1 2116
9dc15871 2117* Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
a933dad1 2118
ade79051
KS
2119** Windows 95 and networking.
2120
2121To support server sockets, Emacs 22.1 loads ws2_32.dll. If this file
2122is missing, all Emacs networking features are disabled.
2123
2124Old versions of Windows 95 may not have the required DLL. To use
2125Emacs' networking features on Windows 95, you must install the
2126"Windows Socket 2" update available from MicroSoft's support Web.
2127
9dc15871 2128** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
a933dad1 2129
9dc15871
EZ
2130A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
2131Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
2132problem.
a933dad1 2133
de66e883
JR
2134** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 22.1
2135
2136Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameter
2137with a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems.
2138Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control over
2139which font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character,
2140use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset.
a933dad1 2141
9dc15871
EZ
2142Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
2143is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
2144displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
2145synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
2146waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
2147pop-up menu interaction.
a933dad1 2148
9dc15871
EZ
2149Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
2150for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
a933dad1 2151
af71f3ce
EZ
2152When "ClearType" method is selected as the "method to smooth edges of
2153screen fonts" (in Display Properties, Appearance tab, under
2154"Effects"), there are various problems related to display of
2155characters: 2-pixel trace is left behind when moving overlays, bold
2156fonts can be hard to read, small portions of some characters could
2157appear chopped, etc. This happens because, under ClearType,
2158characters are drawn outside their advertised bounding box. Emacs 21
2159disabled the use of ClearType, whereas Emacs 22 allows it and has some
2160code to enlarge the width of the bounding box. Apparently, this
2161display feature needs more changes to get it 100% right. A workaround
2162is to disable ClearType.
2163
9dc15871
EZ
2164There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
2165mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
2166frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
2167after moving back into it.
a933dad1 2168
9dc15871
EZ
2169Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
2170not as severely as in 21.1.
a933dad1 2171
9dc15871
EZ
2172An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
2173Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
a933dad1 2174
4ed1bce5 2175Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. However, some
9dc15871
EZ
2176of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
2177in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
4ed1bce5
EZ
2178characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make these
2179input methods work with Emacs, set the keyboard coding system to the
2180appropriate value after you activate the Windows input method. For
2181example, if you activate the Hebrew input method, type this:
2182
2183 C-x RET k hebrew-iso-8bit RET
2184
2185(Emacs ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up
2186the appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do
2187that yet.) In addition, to use these Windows input methods, you
2188should set your "Language for non-Unicode programs" (on Windows XP,
2189this is on the Advanced tab of Regional Settings) to the language of
2190the input method.
a933dad1 2191
868c31fe
EZ
2192To bind keys that produce non-ASCII characters with modifiers, you
2193must specify raw byte codes. For instance, if you want to bind
2194META-a-grave to a command, you need to specify this in your `~/.emacs':
2195
2196 (global-set-key [?\M-\340] ...)
2197
2198The above example is for the Latin-1 environment where the byte code
2199of the encoded a-grave is 340 octal. For other environments, use the
2200encoding appropriate to that environment.
2201
9dc15871
EZ
2202The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
2203month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
2204of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
2205library function.
a933dad1 2206
cdc9f5c2
JR
2207The function set-time-zone-rule gives incorrect results for many
2208non-US timezones. This is due to over-simplistic handling of
2209daylight savings switchovers by the Windows libraries.
9f1bc31f 2210
ae51f2bc
EZ
2211Files larger than 4GB cause overflow in the size (represented as a
221232-bit integer) reported by `file-attributes'. This affects Dired as
2213well, since the Windows port uses a Lisp emulation of `ls' that relies
2214on `file-attributes'.
2215
d6ff8a30
EZ
2216Sound playing is not supported with the `:data DATA' key-value pair.
2217You _must_ use the `:file FILE' method.
2218
0a4dd4e4 2219** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
a933dad1 2220
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2221This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
2222you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
2223and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
2224more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
d169ccbd
EZ
2225or disable it in the "Regional and Language Options" applet of the
2226Control Panel. (The exact sequence of mouse clicks in the "Regional
2227and Language Options" applet needed to find the key combination that
2228changes the keyboard layout depends on your Windows version; for XP,
2229in the Languages tab, click "Details" and then "Key Settings".)
a933dad1 2230
651f8172
EZ
2231** Cygwin build of Emacs hangs after rebasing Cygwin DLLs
2232
2233Usually, on Cygwin, one needs to rebase the DLLs if an application
2234aborts with a message like this:
2235
2236 C:\cygwin\bin\python.exe: *** unable to remap C:\cygwin\bin\cygssl.dll to
2237 same address as parent(0xDF0000) != 0xE00000
2238
2239However, since Cygwin DLL 1.5.17 was released, after such rebasing,
2240Emacs hangs.
2241
2242This was reported to happen for Emacs 21.2 and also for the pretest of
2243Emacs 22.1 on Cygwin.
2244
2245To work around this, build Emacs like this:
2246
2247 LDFLAGS='-Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base' ./configure
2248 make LD='$(CC)'
2249 make LD='$(CC)' install
2250
2251This produces an Emacs binary that is independent of rebasing.
2252
2253Note that you _must_ use LD='$(CC)' in the last two commands above, to
2254prevent GCC from passing the "--image-base 0x20000000" option to the
2255linker, which is what it does by default. That option produces an
2256Emacs binary with the base address 0x20000000, which will cause Emacs
2257to hang after Cygwin DLLs are rebased.
2258
0a4dd4e4 2259** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
a933dad1 2260
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2261Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
2262MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
2263port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
2264keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
2265of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
a933dad1 2266
0a4dd4e4 2267** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
a933dad1 2268
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2269If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
2270due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
2271and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
2272port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
2273are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
2274confuses ange-ftp.
a933dad1 2275
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2276The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2277(version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2278Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2279directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2280variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2281client's executable. For example:
a933dad1 2282
9dc15871 2283 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
a933dad1 2284
9dc15871
EZ
2285If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2286this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
a933dad1 2287
9dc15871 2288 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
a933dad1 2289
9dc15871 2290** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
a933dad1 2291
9dc15871
EZ
2292This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2293likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
a933dad1 2294
9dc15871
EZ
2295Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2296print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2297printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2298built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2299has):
a933dad1 2300
9dc15871
EZ
2301(setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2302(setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2303(setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2304(setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
a933dad1 2305
9dc15871 2306** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
a933dad1 2307
9dc15871
EZ
2308The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2309work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2310was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2311work when an antivirus package is installed.
a933dad1 2312
9dc15871
EZ
2313The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2314mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2315or disable it entirely.
a933dad1 2316
9dc15871 2317** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
a933dad1 2318
9dc15871
EZ
2319This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2320programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2321mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2322different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2323middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2324"scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2325generic mouse driver might help.
a933dad1 2326
9dc15871 2327** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
a933dad1 2328
9dc15871
EZ
2329This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2330generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2331movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2332scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
a933dad1 2333
9dc15871
EZ
2334** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2335mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2336exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2337seen.
a933dad1 2338
9dc15871
EZ
2339** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2340CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
a933dad1 2341
9dc15871 2342This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
a933dad1 2343
9dc15871
EZ
2344Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2345events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2346distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2347combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2348AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2349to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
a933dad1 2350
9dc15871 2351** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
a933dad1 2352
9dc15871
EZ
2353The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2354screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2355display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2356to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
a933dad1 2357
9dc15871
EZ
2358This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2359as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2360problem lies in the X-server settings.
a933dad1 2361
9dc15871
EZ
2362There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2363running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2364un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2365selection".
a933dad1 2366
9dc15871
EZ
2367Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2368please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2369If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2370here.
a933dad1 2371
9dc15871 2372* Build-time problems
a933dad1 2373
9dc15871 2374** Configuration
a933dad1 2375
9dc15871 2376*** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
a933dad1 2377
9dc15871
EZ
2378There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2379by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2380default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
a933dad1 2381
9dc15871
EZ
2382If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2383`--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2384shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2385the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2386Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2387explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
a933dad1 2388
f4b84ef4
GM
2389*** `configure' warns ``accepted by the compiler, rejected by the preprocessor''.
2390
2391This indicates a mismatch between the C compiler and preprocessor that
2392configure is using. For example, on Solaris 10 trying to use
2393CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc (the Sun Studio compiler) together with
2394CPP=/usr/ccs/lib/cpp can result in errors of this form (you may also
2395see the error ``"/usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h", line 500: undefined control'').
2396
2397The solution is to tell configure to use the correct C preprocessor
2398for your C compiler (CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E" in the above
2399example).
2400
2401*** `configure' fails with ``"junk.c", line 660: invalid input token: 8.elc''
2402
2403The final stage of the Emacs configure process uses the C preprocessor
2404to generate the Makefiles. Errors of this form can occur if the C
2405preprocessor inserts extra whitespace into its output. The solution
2406is to find the switches that stop your preprocessor from inserting extra
2407whitespace, add them to CPPFLAGS, and re-run configure. For example,
2408this error can occur on Solaris 10 when using the Sun Studio compiler
2409``Sun C 5.8'' with its preprocessor CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E".
2410The relevant switch in this case is "-Xs" (``compile assuming
2411(pre-ANSI) K & R C style code'').
2412
9dc15871 2413** Compilation
a933dad1 2414
9dc15871 2415*** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
a933dad1 2416
9dc15871 2417This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
880ea925 2418(Red Hat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
9dc15871
EZ
2419(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2420configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2421files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2422left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2423itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2424Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
a933dad1 2425
9dc15871
EZ
2426In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2427machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2428(it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2429This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
a933dad1 2430
9dc15871
EZ
2431If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2432(Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2433you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2434force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2435problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2436blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2437`mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2438options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2439`/etc/auto.home'.
a933dad1 2440
9dc15871
EZ
2441Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2442a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2443waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2444to work around the problem.
a933dad1 2445
9dc15871
EZ
2446Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2447onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2448you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2449`/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
a933dad1 2450
9dc15871 2451 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
a933dad1 2452
9dc15871 2453The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
a933dad1 2454
9dc15871 2455*** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
a933dad1 2456
9dc15871
EZ
2457This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2458of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2459version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2460dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2461around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2462incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2463". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2464directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2465variables).
a933dad1 2466
9dc15871
EZ
2467The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2468`-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2469when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2470unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2471run the script like this:
a933dad1 2472
9dc15871 2473 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
a933dad1 2474
9dc15871
EZ
2475(replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2476the script).
a933dad1 2477
9dc15871
EZ
2478Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2479Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
a933dad1 2480
9dc15871
EZ
2481*** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2482*** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
a933dad1 2483
9dc15871
EZ
2484This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2485had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2486problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2487configure script.
a933dad1 2488
9dc15871 2489*** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
a933dad1 2490
9dc15871
EZ
2491This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2492the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2493Emacs's configure script.
a933dad1 2494
745377e8
GM
2495*** Building a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit GNU/Linux architecture.
2496
2497First ensure that the necessary 32-bit system libraries and include
2498files are installed. Then use:
2499
2500 env CC="gcc -m32" ./configure --build=i386-linux-gnu \
2501 --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
2502
2503(using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system).
2504
1020d879 2505*** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC versions
9c9f0081
EZ
2506
2507Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
2508reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time. In
2509addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
2510info. Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
485a6c18
EZ
2511compiling Emacs. GCC versions 4.0.3, 4.0.4, 4.1.1, and 4.1.2
2512reportedly build a working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend
2513these GCC versions. Note that these versions of GCC, 4.0.3, 4.0.4,
25144.1.1, and 4.1.2, are currently the _only_ versions known to succeed
2515in building Emacs (as of v22.1).
9c9f0081
EZ
2516
2517*** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
a933dad1 2518
9dc15871
EZ
2519Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2520version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2521necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2522__MSVCRT__, like so:
a933dad1 2523
9dc15871 2524 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
a933dad1 2525
9dc15871 2526*** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
a933dad1 2527
9dc15871
EZ
2528Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2529to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2530fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
a933dad1 2531
9dc15871 2532*** Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
a933dad1 2533
9dc15871 2534The error message might be something like this:
a933dad1 2535
9dc15871
EZ
2536 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
2537 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
2538 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
2539 '0xffffffff'
2540 Stop.
a933dad1 2541
9dc15871
EZ
2542This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
2543which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
2544`*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
2545endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
2546or EOL conversions.
a933dad1 2547
9dc15871
EZ
2548The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
2549change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
2550in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
2551which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
2552mangling them.
a933dad1 2553
9dc15871 2554*** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
a933dad1 2555
9dc15871
EZ
2556This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2557defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2558patch to assert.h should solve this:
a933dad1 2559
0cc69e7d
EZ
2560 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2561 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2562 ***************
2563 *** 41,47 ****
2564 /*
2565 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2566 */
2567 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
2568
2569 #else /* debugging enabled */
2570
2571 --- 41,47 ----
2572 /*
2573 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2574 */
2575 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
2576
2577 #else /* debugging enabled */
2578
2579
3e7c244e
JR
2580*** Building the MS-Windows port with Visual Studio 2005 fails.
2581
2582Microsoft no longer ships the single threaded version of the C library
2583with their compiler, and the multithreaded static library is missing
0cc69e7d 2584some functions that Microsoft have deemed non-threadsafe. The
3e7c244e
JR
2585dynamically linked C library has all the functions, but there is a
2586conflict between the versions of malloc in the DLL and in Emacs, which
2587is not resolvable due to the way Windows does dynamic linking.
2588
2589We recommend the use of the MingW port of GCC for compiling Emacs, as
2590not only does it not suffer these problems, but it is also Free
2591software like Emacs.
2592
9dc15871 2593** Linking
a933dad1 2594
9dc15871
EZ
2595*** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2596undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
a933dad1 2597
9dc15871
EZ
2598This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2599with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2600GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2601from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2602compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2603link stage.
a933dad1 2604
9dc15871 2605A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
a933dad1 2606
9dc15871 2607 make CC=gcc
a933dad1 2608
9dc15871
EZ
2609Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2610with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
a933dad1 2611
9dc15871 2612*** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
a933dad1 2613
9dc15871
EZ
2614There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2615the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2616workaround/fix is:
a933dad1 2617
9dc15871
EZ
2618 cd /lib
2619 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2620 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
a933dad1 2621
9dc15871
EZ
2622*** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2623 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2624 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
a933dad1 2625
9dc15871
EZ
2626This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2627these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2628you build Emacs:
a933dad1 2629
9dc15871
EZ
2630 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2631 chmod 664 libIM.a
2632 ranlib libIM.a
a933dad1 2633
9dc15871
EZ
2634Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2635Makefile).
a933dad1 2636
9dc15871 2637*** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
a933dad1 2638
9dc15871 2639To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
a933dad1 2640
9dc15871 2641 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
a933dad1 2642
9dc15871 2643and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
a933dad1 2644
9dc15871
EZ
2645The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2646cannot easily arrange to supply them.
a933dad1 2647
9dc15871 2648*** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
a933dad1 2649
9dc15871 2650Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
a933dad1 2651
9dc15871 2652*** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
a933dad1 2653
9dc15871
EZ
2654This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2655version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2656definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2657incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2658does not work with this version of ncurses.
a933dad1 2659
9dc15871 2660The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
a933dad1 2661
9dc15871 2662** Dumping
a933dad1 2663
9dc15871 2664*** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
a933dad1 2665
880ea925 2666With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Red Hat Fedora Core
cf14a51c 26671 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
ed214edf
JD
2668creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs tries
2669to handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, these
2670instructions can be useful.
cf14a51c
JD
2671The work-around explained here is not enough on Fedora Core 4 (and possible
2672newer). Read the next item.
a933dad1 2673
1f02a4ba
JD
2674Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
2675x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
2676workaround is known.
2677
9dc15871 2678You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
a933dad1 2679
9dc15871 2680 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
a933dad1 2681
1f02a4ba 2682It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
9dc15871 2683read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
1f02a4ba
JD
2684associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
2685
2686 echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
a933dad1 2687
9dc15871
EZ
2688When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2689execution of this command:
a933dad1 2690
1f02a4ba 2691 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
177c0ea7 2692
9dc15871 2693To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
1f02a4ba
JD
2694Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
2695command when running temacs like this:
2696
2697 setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
a933dad1 2698
ade79051 2699
cf14a51c
JD
2700*** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.
2701
2702In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during
2703`make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel"
2704item, Linux kernel shipped with Fedora Core 4 randomizes the virtual
2705address space of a process. As the result dumping may fail even if
2706you turn off exec-shield. In this case, use the -R option to the setarch
2707command:
2708
25fd144d 2709 setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
cf14a51c
JD
2710
2711or
2712
ade79051 2713 setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
cf14a51c 2714
9dc15871 2715*** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
a933dad1 2716
9dc15871
EZ
2717This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2718Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
a933dad1 2719
9dc15871
EZ
2720It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2721space available on the machine.
a933dad1 2722
9dc15871
EZ
2723On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2724subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2725for large blocks (many pages).
a933dad1 2726
9dc15871
EZ
2727*** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2728*** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2729*** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2730*** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
a933dad1 2731
9dc15871
EZ
2732This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2733fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2734binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
a933dad1 2735
9dc15871
EZ
2736In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2737It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2738a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2739itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2740when unpacking the shell archive.
a933dad1 2741
9dc15871
EZ
2742I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2743what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2744file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
a933dad1 2745
9dc15871
EZ
2746If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2747nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
a933dad1 2748
9dc15871
EZ
2749 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2750 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2751 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2752 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2753 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2754 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2755 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2756 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2757 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2758 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2759 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2760 and remake temacs.
2761 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
a933dad1 2762
9dc15871 2763*** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
a933dad1 2764
9dc15871
EZ
2765This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2766files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2767space than was allocated.
a933dad1 2768
9dc15871
EZ
2769This could be caused by
2770 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2771 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2772 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2773 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2774 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2775 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2776 deleting that file.
2777 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2778 (not from the directory you expected).
2779 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2780 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2781 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2782 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2783 the space required.
a933dad1 2784
9dc15871
EZ
2785If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2786of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
a933dad1 2787
9dc15871
EZ
2788But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2789of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2790problem.
a933dad1 2791
9dc15871 2792*** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
a933dad1 2793
9dc15871
EZ
2794The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2795C backtrace printed by GDB:
a933dad1 2796
9dc15871
EZ
2797 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2798 (gdb) where
2799 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2800 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2801 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2802 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
a933dad1 2803
9dc15871
EZ
2804This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2805of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2806but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2807other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2808distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2809GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2810following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2811distribution:
a933dad1 2812
9dc15871
EZ
2813 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2814 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2815 know what's really going on here. */
2816 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2817 0x10000000. */
2818 #if defined __linux__
2819 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2820 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2821 #endif
2822 #endif
2823 #endif /* 0 */
a933dad1 2824
9dc15871
EZ
2825Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2826the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2827should now succeed.
a933dad1 2828
0bce976c
GM
2829*** OpenBSD 4.0 macppc: Segfault during dumping.
2830
2831The build aborts with signal 11 when the command `./temacs --batch
14395431 2832--load loadup bootstrap' tries to load files.el. A workaround seems
464df798 2833to be to reduce the level of compiler optimization used during the
14395431
GM
2834build (from -O2 to -O1). It is possible this is an OpenBSD
2835GCC problem specific to the macppc architecture, possibly only
2836occurring with older versions of GCC (e.g. 3.3.5).
0bce976c 2837
ab4461c1
GM
2838*** openSUSE 10.3: Segfault in bcopy during dumping.
2839
2840This is due to a bug in the bcopy implementation in openSUSE 10.3.
2841It is/will be fixed in an openSUSE update.
2842
9dc15871 2843** Installation
a933dad1 2844
9dc15871 2845*** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
a933dad1 2846
9dc15871
EZ
2847You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2848supplies the `install-info' command.
a933dad1 2849
6afdff63
GM
2850*** Installing to a directory with spaces in the name fails.
2851
2852For example, if you call configure with a directory-related option
2853with spaces in the value, eg --enable-locallisppath='/path/with\ spaces'.
2854Using directory paths with spaces is not supported at this time: you
2855must re-configure without using spaces.
2856
6c06422c
CY
2857*** Installing to a directory with non-ASCII characters in the name fails.
2858
2859Installation may fail, or the Emacs executable may not start
2860correctly, if a directory name containing non-ASCII characters is used
2861as a `configure' argument (e.g. `--prefix'). The problem can also
2862occur if a non-ASCII directory is specified in the EMACSLOADPATH
2863envvar.
2864
89eaca5d
GM
2865*** On Solaris, use GNU Make when installing an out-of-tree build
2866
2867The Emacs configuration process allows you to configure the
2868build environment so that you can build emacs in a directory
2869outside of the distribution tree. When installing Emacs from an
2870out-of-tree build directory on Solaris, you may need to use GNU
2871make. The make programs bundled with Solaris support the VPATH
2872macro but use it differently from the way the VPATH macro is
2873used by GNU make. The differences will cause the "make install"
2874step to fail, leaving you with an incomplete emacs
2875installation. GNU make is available in /usr/sfw/bin on Solaris
287610 and can be installed as /opt/sfw/bin/gmake from the Solaris 9
2877Software Companion CDROM.
2878
2879The problems due to the VPATH processing differences affect only
2880out of tree builds so, if you are on a Solaris installation
2881without GNU make, you can install Emacs completely by installing
2882from a build environment using the original emacs distribution tree.
2883
9dc15871 2884** First execution
a933dad1 2885
9dc15871 2886*** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
a933dad1 2887
9dc15871
EZ
2888This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2889via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2890Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2891binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
a933dad1 2892
9dc15871 2893 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
a933dad1 2894
9dc15871
EZ
2895We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2896build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
a933dad1 2897
9dc15871 2898*** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
a933dad1 2899
9dc15871 2900Two causes have been seen for such problems.
a933dad1 2901
9dc15871
EZ
29021) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2903as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2904it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2905value in the man page for a.out (5).
a933dad1 2906
9dc15871
EZ
29072) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2908initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2909of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2910not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2911may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
a933dad1 2912
9dc15871 2913* Emacs 19 problems
a933dad1 2914
9dc15871 2915** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
a933dad1 2916
9dc15871
EZ
2917This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2918Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2919Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2920where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
a933dad1 2921
9dc15871 2922So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
a933dad1 2923
9dc15871 2924* Runtime problems on legacy systems
a933dad1 2925
9dc15871
EZ
2926This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2927If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2928it is unlikely you will see any of these.
a933dad1 2929
9dc15871 2930** Ancient operating systems
a933dad1 2931
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2932AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2933
2934*** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2935
2936 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2937 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2938
2939This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2940libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2941X11Dev... with smit.
2942
2943(This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2944
2945*** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2946
2947Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2948ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2949lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2950treated as control characters.
2951
2952You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2953releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2954
2955*** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2956
2957 Could not load program emacs
2958 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2959 Error was: Exec format error
2960
2961or this one:
2962
2963 Could not load program .emacs
2964 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2965 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2966 Error was: Exec format error
2967
2968These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2969compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2970
2971*** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
2972
2973If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
2974without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
2975
9dc15871 2976*** ISC Unix
a933dad1 2977
9dc15871 2978**** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
a933dad1 2979
9dc15871
EZ
2980Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2981versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2982cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2983This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2984processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
a933dad1 2985
9dc15871
EZ
2986Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2987the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
a933dad1 2988
9dc15871 2989The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
a933dad1 2990
9dc15871 2991*** SunOS
a933dad1 2992
0a4dd4e4
EZ
2993SunOS 4.1.4 stopped shipping on Sep 30 1998.
2994
2995**** SunOS: You get linker errors
2996 ld: Undefined symbol
2997 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
2998 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
2999
9dc15871 3000**** Sun 4.0.x: M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
a933dad1 3001
9dc15871
EZ
3002This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
3003version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
a933dad1 3004
9dc15871 3005**** SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3: Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
a933dad1
DL
3006
3007Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
3008sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
3009delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
3010program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
3011means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
3012command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
3013obtain the destination address.
3014
3015There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
3016In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
3017non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
30182.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
30194.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
3020have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
3021of this writing, these official versions are available:
3022
3023 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
3024 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
3025 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
3026 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
3027 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
3028
3029 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
3030 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
3031
9dc15871 3032**** Sunos 4: You get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
a933dad1 3033
9dc15871
EZ
3034This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
3035for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
3036/usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
a933dad1 3037
9dc15871 3038**** SunOS 4.1.3: Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
a933dad1 3039
9dc15871
EZ
3040This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
3041on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
3042version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
3043it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
a933dad1 3044
9dc15871 3045**** Sunos 4.1.3: Emacs gets hung shortly after startup.
a933dad1 3046
9dc15871
EZ
3047We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
3048one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
a933dad1 3049
9dc15871
EZ
3050100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
3051100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
3052100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
3053100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
3054100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
a933dad1 3055
9dc15871
EZ
3056We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
3057which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
a933dad1 3058
9dc15871
EZ
3059**** SunOS 4: Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
3060(or log out, if you logged in using X).
a933dad1 3061
9dc15871 3062Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
a933dad1 3063
9dc15871
EZ
3064The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
3065or link libXmu statically.
a933dad1 3066
0a4dd4e4
EZ
3067**** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
3068
3069A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
3070exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
3071applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
3072communicating through pipes.
3073
9dc15871 3074*** Apollo Domain
a933dad1 3075
9dc15871 3076**** Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain.
a933dad1 3077
9dc15871 3078You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
a933dad1 3079
9dc15871 3080 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
a933dad1 3081
9dc15871
EZ
3082This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
3083Here is how to make more of them.
a933dad1 3084
9dc15871
EZ
3085 % cd /dev
3086 % ls pty*
3087 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
3088 % /etc/crpty 8
3089 # creates eight new pty's
a933dad1 3090
9dc15871 3091*** Irix
a933dad1 3092
9dc15871 3093*** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
a933dad1 3094
9dc15871
EZ
3095This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
3096as of 8 Dec 1998.
a933dad1 3097
9dc15871 3098The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
a933dad1 3099
9dc15871
EZ
3100*** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
3101in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
a933dad1 3102
9dc15871 3103 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
a933dad1 3104
9dc15871
EZ
3105This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
3106003082 August 11, 1998.
a933dad1 3107
9dc15871 3108*** OPENSTEP
a933dad1 3109
9dc15871 3110**** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
a933dad1 3111
9dc15871
EZ
3112The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
3113following message:
a933dad1 3114
9dc15871 3115 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
a933dad1 3116
9dc15871
EZ
3117To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
3118INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
3119functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
a933dad1 3120
9dc15871
EZ
3121 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
3122 {
3123 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
3124 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
a933dad1 3125
9dc15871
EZ
3126Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
3127with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
a933dad1 3128
9dc15871 3129*** Solaris 2.x
a933dad1 3130
9dc15871 3131**** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
a933dad1 3132
9dc15871
EZ
3133Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
3134editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
3135as GCC.
a933dad1 3136
9dc15871 3137**** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
a933dad1 3138
9dc15871
EZ
3139If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
3140of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
3141called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
a933dad1 3142
9dc15871 3143**** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
a933dad1 3144
9dc15871
EZ
3145This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
3146version of Solaris that you are using.
a933dad1 3147
9dc15871 3148**** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
a933dad1 3149
9dc15871
EZ
3150A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
3151the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
a933dad1 3152
9dc15871 3153We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
a933dad1 3154
9dc15871 3155**** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
a933dad1 3156
9dc15871
EZ
3157Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
3158102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
3159Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
3160by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
3161However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
a933dad1 3162
9dc15871
EZ
3163Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
3164you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
3165We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
3166for certain.
a933dad1 3167
9dc15871
EZ
3168 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
3169 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
3170 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
a933dad1 3171
9dc15871
EZ
3172(One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
3173with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
a933dad1 3174
9dc15871
EZ
3175If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
3176bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
a933dad1 3177
9dc15871
EZ
3178Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
3179Solaris 2.5.
a933dad1 3180
9dc15871
EZ
3181**** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
3182forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
a933dad1 3183
9dc15871
EZ
3184casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
3185after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
a933dad1 3186
9dc15871
EZ
3187 #if ThreadedX
3188 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3189 #endif
a933dad1 3190
9dc15871 3191to:
a933dad1 3192
9dc15871
EZ
3193 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
3194 #if ThreadedX
3195 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3196 #endif
3197 #endif
3198
3199Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
3200(as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
3201OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
3202Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
3203definition for your type of machine and system.
a933dad1 3204
9dc15871
EZ
3205Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
3206the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
3207Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
a933dad1 3208
9dc15871
EZ
3209For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
3210101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
3211to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
3212patch.
a933dad1 3213
9dc15871
EZ
3214However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
3215he changed
3216 #define ThreadedX YES
3217to
3218 #define ThreadedX NO
3219in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
3220`-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
3221typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
a933dad1 3222
9dc15871 3223**** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
a933dad1 3224
9dc15871
EZ
3225This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
3226are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
3227does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
3228later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
3229described in the Solaris FAQ
3230<http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
3231to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
a933dad1 3232
9dc15871
EZ
3233**** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
3234C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
3235compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
3236release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
3237another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
3238and the default CFLAGS.
a933dad1 3239
9dc15871 3240**** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
a933dad1 3241
9dc15871
EZ
3242The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
3243Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
3244(Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
3245You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
3246You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
3247look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
3248are currently recommended for your host.
a933dad1 3249
9dc15871
EZ
3250On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
3251105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
3252105284-18 might fix it again.
a933dad1 3253
0a4dd4e4 3254**** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
a933dad1 3255
9dc15871
EZ
3256This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
3257the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
3258support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
3259If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
a933dad1 3260
9dc15871
EZ
3261One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
3262For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
3263variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
3264lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
3265should do.
a933dad1 3266
9dc15871
EZ
3267pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
3268if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
3269libraries.
a933dad1 3270
0a4dd4e4
EZ
3271*** HP/UX versions before 11.0
3272
bf247b6e 3273HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
0a4dd4e4
EZ
3274HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
3275
3276**** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
3277
3278We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
3279the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
3280does not happen.
3281
3282*** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
3283
3284See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
3285
3286*** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
3287
3288This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
3289doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
3290because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
3291libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
3292those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
3293install them and rebuild Emacs.
3294
9dc15871 3295*** Ultrix and Digital Unix
a933dad1 3296
9dc15871 3297**** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
a933dad1 3298
9dc15871
EZ
3299This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
3300commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
3301Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
3302hand.
a933dad1 3303
9dc15871 3304**** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
a933dad1 3305
9dc15871
EZ
3306So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
3307is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
3308properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
3309`tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
3310in Emacs.
a933dad1 3311
9dc15871 3312**** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
a933dad1 3313
9dc15871
EZ
3314On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
3315in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
3316expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
3317in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
a933dad1 3318
9dc15871
EZ
3319The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
3320anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
a933dad1 3321
9dc15871
EZ
3322I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
3323going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
3324Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
3325in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
a933dad1 3326
9dc15871 3327*** SVr4
a933dad1 3328
9dc15871 3329**** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
a933dad1 3330
9dc15871
EZ
3331Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
3332the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
3333sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
a933dad1 3334
9dc15871 3335**** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
a933dad1 3336
9dc15871
EZ
3337Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
3338mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
3339the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
a933dad1 3340
9dc15871
EZ
3341Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
3342you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
3343operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
3344configure script) that reads:
3345#define SYSTEM_MALLOC
3346This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
3347the kernel bug.
a933dad1 3348
0a4dd4e4
EZ
3349*** Irix 5 and earlier
3350
bf247b6e 3351Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
0a4dd4e4
EZ
3352shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
3353
3354**** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
3355
3356The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
3357Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
3358compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
3359workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
3360syms.h.
3361
3362**** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
3363
3364This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
3365many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
3366swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
3367can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
3368command `swap -l'.
3369
3370You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
3371line like this:
3372
3373/usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
3374
3375where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
3376by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
3377that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
3378new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
3379information.
3380
3381The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
3382swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
3383on the network that can log on to the host.
3384
3385If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
3386the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
3387some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
3388icons.
3389
3390You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
3391FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
3392("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
3393ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
3394
3395**** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
3396
3397This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
3398It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
3399
3400**** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
3401
3402A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
3403in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
3404find that string, and take out the spaces.
3405
3406Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
3407
3408*** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3409
3410**** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3411
3412The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3413that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3414fonts, so it does not work.
3415
3416This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3417the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3418emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3419that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3420resources affect Emacs also:
3421
3422 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3423 *Background: scoBackground
3424 *Foreground: scoForeground
3425
3426The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3427Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3428
3429 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3430 Emacs*Background: white
3431 Emacs*Foreground: black
3432
3433(These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3434suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3435starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3436environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3437as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3438/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3439but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3440Open Desktop display.
3441
3442These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3443machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3444
3445**** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3446
3447On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3448with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3449version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3450C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3451GCC.
3452
3453**** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3454
3455Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3456virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3457the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3458error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3459exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3460memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3461
3462You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3463But you have to be root to do it.
3464
3465According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3466
3467 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3468 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3469 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3470 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3471 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3472
3473(He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3474These changes take effect when you reboot.
3475
9dc15871 3476*** Linux 1.x
a933dad1 3477
9dc15871 3478**** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
a933dad1 3479
9dc15871
EZ
3480This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3481to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3482Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
a933dad1 3483
9dc15871
EZ
3484**** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3485truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
a933dad1 3486
9dc15871
EZ
3487This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
34881.3.75.
a933dad1 3489
0a4dd4e4
EZ
3490** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3491
3492*** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3493
3494`perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3495The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3496
3497The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3498"CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3499with the user.
3500
3501On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3502pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3503communicate with the subprocess.
3504
3505On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3506relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3507redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3508stdin.
3509
3510A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3511
3512For Perl 4:
3513
3514 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3515 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3516 ***************
3517 *** 68,74 ****
3518 $rcfile=".perldb";
3519 }
3520 else {
3521 ! $console = "con";
3522 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3523 }
3524
3525 --- 68,74 ----
3526 $rcfile=".perldb";
3527 }
3528 else {
3529 ! $console = "";
3530 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3531 }
3532
3533
3534 For Perl 5:
3535 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3536 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3537 ***************
3538 *** 22,28 ****
3539 $rcfile=".perldb";
3540 }
3541 elsif (-e "con") {
3542 ! $console = "con";
3543 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3544 }
3545 else {
3546 --- 22,28 ----
3547 $rcfile=".perldb";
3548 }
3549 elsif (-e "con") {
3550 ! $console = "";
3551 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3552 }
3553 else {
3554
3555*** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3556
3557This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3558You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3559
3560*** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3561
3562This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3563when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3564cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3565http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3566
3567*** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3568
3569When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3570Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3571particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3572program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3573PATH.
3574
9dc15871 3575** MS-DOS
a933dad1 3576
9dc15871 3577*** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
a933dad1 3578
9dc15871
EZ
3579If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3580Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3581program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3582config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3583the front of your PATH environment variable.
a933dad1 3584
9dc15871
EZ
3585*** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3586like make-docfile.
a933dad1 3587
9dc15871
EZ
3588This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3589variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3590compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
3591the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
a933dad1 3592
9dc15871 3593*** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
a933dad1 3594
9dc15871 3595 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
a933dad1 3596
9dc15871
EZ
3597This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3598on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3599value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3600works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3601support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3602undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3603[emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3604`TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3605your system works as before.
a933dad1 3606
9dc15871 3607*** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
a933dad1 3608
9dc15871
EZ
3609Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3610and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3611know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3612memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3613However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
a933dad1 3614
9dc15871
EZ
3615You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3616arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3617information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3618is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
a933dad1 3619
9dc15871
EZ
3620Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3621configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3622removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3623and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3624the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
a933dad1 3625
9dc15871
EZ
3626*** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3627in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3628drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
a933dad1 3629
9dc15871
EZ
3630This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3631device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3632work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
a933dad1 3633
9dc15871 3634*** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
a933dad1 3635
9dc15871 3636There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
a933dad1 3637
9dc15871
EZ
3638 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3639 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3640 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
a933dad1 3641
9dc15871
EZ
3642To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3643subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3644them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3645incorrect library functions.
a933dad1 3646
9dc15871
EZ
3647*** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3648run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
a933dad1 3649
9dc15871
EZ
3650Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3651immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3652the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3653and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
a933dad1 3654
9dc15871
EZ
3655Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3656the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3657Lisp.
a933dad1 3658
9dc15871
EZ
3659This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3660support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3661characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3662You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3663filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3664compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
3665explains this issue in more detail.
a933dad1 3666
9dc15871
EZ
3667Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3668MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3669by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3670unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3671them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3672must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3673properly truncated.
a933dad1 3674
9dc15871 3675** Archaic window managers and toolkits
a933dad1 3676
9dc15871 3677*** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
a933dad1 3678
9dc15871
EZ
3679Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3680command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3681Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3682manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3683shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
a933dad1 3684
9dc15871 3685 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
a933dad1 3686
9dc15871 3687**** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
a933dad1 3688
9dc15871
EZ
3689twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3690You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
a933dad1 3691
9dc15871 3692 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
a933dad1 3693
9dc15871 3694** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
a933dad1 3695
9dc15871 3696*** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
a933dad1 3697
9dc15871 3698This shell command should fix it:
a933dad1 3699
9dc15871 3700 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
a933dad1 3701
9dc15871
EZ
3702*** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3703as a concentrator.
a933dad1 3704
9dc15871
EZ
3705This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
37067 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
a933dad1 3707
9dc15871 3708* Build problems on legacy systems
a933dad1 3709
9dc15871 3710** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
a933dad1 3711
9dc15871
EZ
3712This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3713The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3714such as bash.
a933dad1 3715
9dc15871
EZ
3716** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3717 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
a933dad1 3718
9dc15871
EZ
3719This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3720Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
a933dad1 3721
9dc15871 3722** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
a933dad1 3723
9dc15871 3724This problem manifests itself as an error message
a933dad1 3725
9dc15871 3726 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
a933dad1 3727
9dc15871
EZ
3728The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3729were built for an older system version,
a933dad1 3730
9dc15871 3731 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
a933dad1 3732
9dc15871 3733made the problem go away.
a933dad1 3734
9dc15871 3735** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
a933dad1 3736
9dc15871 3737If you get errors such as
a933dad1 3738
9dc15871
EZ
3739 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3740 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3741 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
a933dad1 3742
9dc15871
EZ
3743This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3744to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3745script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3746make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3747ones available when you build Emacs.
a933dad1 3748
9dc15871 3749** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
a933dad1 3750
9dc15871 3751 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
a933dad1 3752
9dc15871 3753The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
a933dad1 3754
9dc15871 3755The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
a933dad1 3756
9dc15871 3757** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
a933dad1 3758
9dc15871
EZ
3759If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3760_iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3761-lXaw in the command that links temacs.
a933dad1 3762
9dc15871
EZ
3763This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3764extensions to X11R5 are installed.
a933dad1 3765
9dc15871 3766** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
a933dad1 3767
9dc15871
EZ
3768If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3769`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3770that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3771with a floating point option other than the default.
a933dad1 3772
9dc15871
EZ
3773It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3774crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3775However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3776floating point option: -fsoft.
a933dad1 3777
9dc15871 3778** SunOS: Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose.
a933dad1 3779
9dc15871
EZ
3780If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
3781with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
3782the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
3783libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
3784toolkit.)
a933dad1 3785
9dc15871
EZ
3786If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
3787lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
3788X11R4, then use it in the link.
a933dad1 3789
0a4dd4e4
EZ
3790** SunOS4, DGUX 5.4.2: --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
3791
3792On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
3793unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
3794toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
3795libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
3796unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
3797and Solaris in version 19.29.
3798
3799** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3800
3801This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3802
9dc15871 3803** VMS: Compilation errors on VMS.
a933dad1 3804
9dc15871
EZ
3805You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
3806variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
3807This is not an error. Ignore it.
a933dad1 3808
9dc15871
EZ
3809VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
3810were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
a933dad1 3811
9dc15871
EZ
3812There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
3813in conditional expressions. The bug is:
3814 char c = -1, d = 1;
3815 int i;
a933dad1 3816
9dc15871
EZ
3817 i = d ? c : d;
3818The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
3819conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
3820constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
a933dad1 3821
9dc15871 3822** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
a933dad1
DL
3823
3824You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3825
3826 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3827 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3828
3829These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3830Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3831may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3832on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3833in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3834can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3835that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3836
3837As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3838you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3839can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3840should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3841array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3842 Lisp_Object *args;
3843 ...
3844 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3845putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3846 Lisp_Object *args;
3847 Lisp_Object tem;
3848 ...
3849 tem = args[i];
3850 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3851causes the problem to go away.
3852The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3853so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3854
9dc15871 3855** 68000 C compiler problems
a933dad1
DL
3856
3857Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3858These are some that have been observed.
3859
9dc15871 3860*** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
a933dad1
DL
3861This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3862if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3863
9dc15871 3864*** "cannot reclaim" error.
a933dad1
DL
3865
3866This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3867line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3868simpler expressions.
3869
9dc15871 3870*** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
a933dad1
DL
3871
3872If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3873Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3874
3875struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3876
3877lose (arg)
3878 struct foo arg;
3879{
3880 test ((int *) arg.y);
3881}
3882
3883If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3884In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3885((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3886
3887This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3888of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3889
9dc15871 3890*** C compilers lose on returning unions.
a933dad1
DL
3891
3892I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3893Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3894defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3895
3896This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3897of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3898
53854552 3899\f
5b87ad55 3900This file is part of GNU Emacs.
fe6b4873 3901
5b87ad55
GM
3902GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
3903it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
fca4a5de 3904the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
5b87ad55 3905any later version.
fe6b4873 3906
5b87ad55
GM
3907GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
3908but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
3909MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
3910GNU General Public License for more details.
3911
3912You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
3913along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
3914Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
3915Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
3916
3917\f
53854552
EZ
3918Local variables:
3919mode: outline
3920paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3921end:
ab5796a9
MB
3922
3923arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a