1 Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
2 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
3 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 See the end of the file for license conditions.
7 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
8 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
9 and browsing through the outline headers.
11 * Emacs startup failures
13 ** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
15 A typical error message might be something like
17 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
19 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
20 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
23 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
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
29 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
30 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
31 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
33 ** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
35 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
36 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
37 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
38 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
39 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
40 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
41 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
42 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
45 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
46 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
47 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
48 same directory where system header files are kept.
50 ** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
52 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
53 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
54 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
55 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
56 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
57 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
59 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
60 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
61 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
62 it constitutes a separate package.
64 ** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
66 The typical error message might be like this:
68 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
70 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
71 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
72 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
73 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
74 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
75 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
76 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
78 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
79 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
81 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
84 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
85 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
86 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
88 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
90 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
91 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
94 ** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
96 An example of such an error is:
98 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
100 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
101 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
102 present in load-path:
104 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
106 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
107 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
110 ** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
112 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
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
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 /******************************************************************
121 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
128 + char* begin = NULL;
132 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
135 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
137 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
138 + if (begin != NULL) {
139 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
143 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
149 ** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
151 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
152 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
153 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
154 happens to exist on your X server).
156 ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
158 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
159 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
160 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
162 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
163 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
165 ** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
166 a segmentation fault and core dump.
168 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
169 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
171 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
173 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
176 ** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
177 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
178 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
179 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
182 ** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
184 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
185 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
186 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
187 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
188 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
190 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
191 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
194 ** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
196 If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
197 reported to prevent the crashes.
199 ** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
201 It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
203 This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
204 the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
205 flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
206 necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
208 On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
209 configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
211 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes when closing a display (x-close-connection).
213 This happens because of bugs in Gtk+. Gtk+ 2.10 seems to be OK. See bug
214 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
216 * General runtime problems
220 *** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
222 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
223 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
224 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
225 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
227 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
228 than the corresponding .el file.
230 *** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
232 These control the actions of Emacs.
233 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
234 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
237 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
238 of them, then try again.
240 *** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
242 The error message might be something like this:
244 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
246 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
247 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
248 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
251 *** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
253 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
254 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
255 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
257 *** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
258 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
259 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
260 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
264 *** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
266 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
267 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
268 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
269 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
270 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
271 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
273 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
274 them to two different keys.
276 *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
278 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
279 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
280 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
282 *** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
283 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
285 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
286 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
287 another escape character in kermit. One user did
289 set escape-character 17
291 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
293 ** Mailers and other helper programs
295 *** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
297 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
298 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
299 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
300 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
301 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
304 *** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
306 RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
307 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
308 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
310 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
311 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
312 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
313 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
314 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
315 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
316 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
318 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
319 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
320 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
321 `mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
326 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
327 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
328 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
329 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
335 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
336 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
337 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
338 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
339 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
340 directory copy is ineffective.
342 *** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
344 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
345 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
347 ** Problems with hostname resolution
349 *** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
350 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
351 *** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
352 *** Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
354 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
355 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
356 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
357 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
359 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
360 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
362 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
363 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
365 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
367 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
368 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
369 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
370 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
371 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
372 be careful not to lose the others.
374 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
376 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
378 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
379 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
382 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
384 *** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
386 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
387 either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
388 calls for specifying this.
390 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
391 mail-host-address to the value you want.
395 *** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
398 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
399 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
400 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
401 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
402 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
403 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
405 *** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
406 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
407 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
410 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
411 call in the RFS server.
413 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
414 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
415 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
416 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
418 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
420 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
421 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
422 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
423 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
424 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
425 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
426 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
428 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
430 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
431 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
432 retrieving revision 1.2
433 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
434 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
435 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
439 * No return sent for close or fsync!
441 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
442 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
447 * No return sent for close or fsync!
449 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
450 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
456 *** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
457 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
458 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
460 *** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
462 PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
463 as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
464 of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
465 sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
466 HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
467 (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
468 (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
470 *** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
471 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
472 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
475 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
476 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
477 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
478 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
480 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
481 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
482 + (insert-file-contents entity)
483 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
484 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
485 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
489 You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
492 *** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
494 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
497 *** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
499 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
500 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
504 *** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit.
506 When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examined
507 directory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous message
508 from which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committed
509 files. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer are
510 not updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines are
511 added to the top-level directory.
513 This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS
514 1.12.10 or newer to fix this problem.
516 ** Miscellaneous problems
518 *** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
520 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
521 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
522 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
524 *** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
527 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
528 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
529 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
532 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
533 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
534 it only if it is undefined.
536 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
538 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
539 happen in a non-login shell.
541 *** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
543 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
544 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
545 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
546 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
549 if ("$EMACS" =~ /*) then
551 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
555 *** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
557 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
558 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
559 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
562 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
564 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
566 *** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
568 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
569 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
570 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
571 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
572 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
573 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
575 update-alternatives --config ftp
577 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
579 *** JPEG images aren't displayed.
581 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
582 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
583 correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
584 against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
586 *** Dired is very slow.
588 This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
589 time. Possible reasons for this include:
591 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
592 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
594 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
596 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
598 To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
599 `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
600 invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
601 (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
603 *** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
604 under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
606 *** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
608 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
609 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
610 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
611 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
613 *** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
615 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
616 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
617 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
619 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
621 *** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
622 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
623 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
624 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
625 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
627 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
628 process invokes Emacs several times.
630 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
631 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
634 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
635 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
636 specified run-time search path in the executable.
638 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
639 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
640 backtraces like this:
643 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]
644 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
645 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
646 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
647 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
648 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
649 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
650 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
651 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
653 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
654 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
655 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
656 to work around the problem.
658 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
660 *** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
661 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
663 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
664 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
665 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
667 *** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
669 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
670 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
671 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
672 support for 8-bit characters.
674 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
675 this at your shell's prompt:
679 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
680 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
683 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
684 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
685 Then rebuild the speller.
687 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
688 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
690 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
691 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
692 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
693 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
694 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
696 If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
697 you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
698 can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
699 in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
701 * Runtime problems related to font handling
703 ** Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
705 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
706 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
707 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
709 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
710 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
711 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
713 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
714 display all the characters Emacs supports. The etl-unicode collection
715 of fonts (available from <URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/fonts/> and
716 <URL:ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/mirror/X.Org/contrib/fonts/>) includes
717 fonts that can display many Unicode characters; they can also be used
718 by ps-print and ps-mule to print Unicode characters.
720 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
721 missing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur for
722 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
723 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
724 of this character to display a space.
726 ** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
728 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution
729 or the etl-unicode collection (see the previous entry).
731 ** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
733 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
734 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
735 lines do not overlap.
737 ** Loading fonts is very slow.
739 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
740 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
741 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
744 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
745 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
747 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
748 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
749 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
751 ** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
753 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
754 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
755 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
756 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
757 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
758 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
759 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
760 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
761 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
762 to the end of a very large buffer.
764 Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
765 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
766 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
767 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
769 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
770 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
771 fontification by setting the variable
772 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
773 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
775 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
776 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
778 ** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
779 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
781 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
782 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
783 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
785 ** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
787 This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
788 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
789 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
790 the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
791 fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
792 Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
793 and then start the application again.
794 If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
795 application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
796 of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
797 sufficient to recompile Qt.
799 ** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
801 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
802 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
803 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
804 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
806 A workaround for this is to add something like
808 emacs.waitForWM: false
810 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
811 frame's parameter list, like this:
813 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
815 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
817 ** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
819 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
820 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
821 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
822 problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
825 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
826 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
829 ** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
831 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
832 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
833 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
834 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
835 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
837 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
838 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
840 * Internationalization problems
842 ** M-{ does not work on a Spanish PC keyboard.
844 Many Spanish keyboards seem to ignore that combination. Emacs can't
845 do anything about it.
847 ** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
849 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
850 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
851 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
852 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
853 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
854 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
855 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
856 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
857 include in the fontset spec:
859 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
860 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
861 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
863 ** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
865 Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in the
866 ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts of
867 CJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets:
869 GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601
871 The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on by
872 default). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacs
873 charset is decided by the current language environment. For instance,
874 in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312.
876 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
877 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
878 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
879 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
880 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
881 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
884 ** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
886 Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
887 library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
888 following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
889 though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
890 distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
892 --- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
893 +++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
894 @@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
900 - (mucs-define-coding-system
901 - (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
902 - (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
903 - (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
905 + (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
906 + ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
907 + ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
908 + ;; system definitions.
909 + (let ((y (cadr x)))
910 + (mucs-define-coding-system
911 + (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
912 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
915 + (mucs-define-coding-system
916 + (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
917 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
918 + (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
922 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
924 Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
925 Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
927 ** Mule-UCS compilation problem.
929 Emacs of old versions and XEmacs byte-compile the form `(progn progn
930 ...)' the same way as `(progn ...)', but Emacs of version 21.3 and the
931 later process that form just as interpreter does, that is, as `progn'
932 variable reference. Apply the following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 to
933 make it compiled by the latest Emacs.
935 --- mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 00:42:23 -0000 1.1.1.1
936 +++ mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 01:31:51 -0000 1.3
937 @@ -639,10 +639,14 @@
938 (mucs-notify-embedment 'mucs-ccl-required name)
939 (setq ccl-pgm-list (cdr ccl-pgm-list)))
940 ; (message "MCCLREGFIN:%S" result)
942 - (setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
943 - (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
945 + ;; The only way the function is used in this package is included
946 + ;; in `mucs-package-definition-end-hook' value, where it must
947 + ;; return (possibly empty) *list* of forms. Do this. Do not rely
948 + ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)'
950 + `((setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
951 + (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
954 ;;; Add hook for embedding translation informations to a package.
955 (add-hook 'mucs-package-definition-end-hook
957 ** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
959 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
960 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
961 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
962 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
963 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
964 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
966 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
968 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
970 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
973 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
974 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
977 ** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
979 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
980 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
981 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
982 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
983 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
985 ** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
987 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
988 (standard-display-european t)
989 That should be changed to
990 (standard-display-european 1 t)
994 ** X keyboard problems
996 *** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
998 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
999 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
1000 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
1001 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
1003 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
1005 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
1007 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
1008 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
1009 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
1011 *** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
1013 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
1015 *** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method).
1017 Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program
1018 which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users
1019 from using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'.
1021 One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' file
1022 which can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory.
1023 However, that requires root access.
1025 Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources.
1027 Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.
1029 The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx
1030 (Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. If
1031 you want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitx
1032 by another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or be
1033 accustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'.
1035 *** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1037 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1038 for character composition.
1040 *** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1042 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1043 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1044 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1045 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1048 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1049 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1051 *** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1053 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1054 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1055 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1056 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1059 *** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
1061 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
1062 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
1063 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
1065 *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
1066 directly with an X server.
1068 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
1069 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
1070 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
1071 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
1072 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
1073 have made the key binding correctly.
1075 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
1076 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
1077 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
1080 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
1082 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
1083 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
1085 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1086 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1087 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1088 modifier bit not otherwise used.
1090 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1091 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1092 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1093 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
1095 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1096 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
1098 ** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
1100 *** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM.
1102 This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later
1103 is running. If gnome-settings-daemon is not running, Emacs receives
1104 input through XIM without any problem. Furthermore, this seems only
1105 to happen in *.UTF-8 locales; zh_CN.GB2312 and zh_CN.GBK locales, for
1106 example, work fine. A bug report has been filed in the Gnome
1107 bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357032
1109 *** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
1111 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1112 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1113 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1114 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1117 *** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1120 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1121 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1124 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1125 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1126 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1127 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1128 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1130 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1131 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1132 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1133 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1134 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1135 present or commented out:
1137 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1138 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1142 *** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1144 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1145 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1146 of klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections,
1147 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1148 while, Emacs may print a message:
1150 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1152 A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
1153 comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
1155 *** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1157 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1158 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1159 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1160 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1162 *** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1163 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1164 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1167 *** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1168 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1169 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1170 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1171 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1172 used with neXtaw at run time.
1174 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1175 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1178 *** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
1180 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1181 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1182 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1183 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
1185 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1186 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
1188 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1189 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1190 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
1192 *** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
1194 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1195 emulation for which it is set up.
1197 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
1198 Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
1199 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1200 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1201 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1202 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1205 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1206 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1207 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1210 *** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1212 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1214 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1216 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1217 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1218 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1219 the resource prevents the problem.
1221 ** General X problems
1223 *** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1225 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1226 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1227 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1228 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1230 Here's how to do this:
1232 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1234 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1235 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1238 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1240 *** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
1242 The messages might say something like this:
1244 Unable to load color "grey95"
1246 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
1248 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
1250 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1251 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1252 resources to load all the colors it needs.
1254 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
1256 "undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the
1257 X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where
1258 X expects to find it.
1260 *** Improving performance with slow X connections.
1262 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1263 be carried out at the same time:
1265 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1266 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1267 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1268 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1271 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
1272 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the
1273 following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only
1274 after the the initial frame is displayed:
1276 (scroll-bar-mode -1)
1280 For still quicker startup, put these X resources in your .Xdefaults
1283 Emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
1287 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1288 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
1290 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1291 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1292 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1293 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1294 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
1295 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate
1296 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1297 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1298 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1299 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1300 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
1302 5) If copying and killing is slow, try to disable the interaction with the
1303 native system's clipboard by adding these lines to your .emacs file:
1304 (setq interprogram-cut-function nil)
1305 (setq interprogram-paste-function nil)
1307 *** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1309 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1310 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1313 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1315 *** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1317 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1318 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1320 *** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
1322 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1323 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1324 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1327 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1328 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1329 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1330 workaround can be found.
1332 *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1333 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
1335 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1337 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1338 that isn't a color.)
1340 The fix is to correct your X resources.
1342 *** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
1344 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1345 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1346 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1349 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1350 your font path, like this:
1352 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
1354 *** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
1356 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
1358 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
1360 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1361 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1362 want, rewrite the resource.
1364 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1365 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1366 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
1368 *** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1369 *** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
1371 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1372 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1375 *** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
1377 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1378 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1379 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
1381 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1382 whether this problem is present on a given system.
1384 *** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
1386 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1387 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1388 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1389 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
1391 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1392 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1393 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
1395 The easy way to do this is to put
1397 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
1399 in your site-init.el file.
1401 * Runtime problems on character termunals
1403 ** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
1405 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1406 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1407 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1408 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1409 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1410 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1411 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1412 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
1414 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
1416 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1417 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1418 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
1420 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1421 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1422 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
1423 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1424 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1425 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
1427 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1428 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1429 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1430 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1431 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1432 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1433 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1434 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1435 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
1437 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1438 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1439 codes. You might as well try it.
1441 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1442 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1443 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1444 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1445 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1446 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1447 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1448 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
1450 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1451 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1452 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1453 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1454 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1457 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1458 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1459 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1460 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1461 other control characters are already used by emacs.
1463 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1464 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1467 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1468 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1469 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1470 automatically. Here is an example:
1472 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1474 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1475 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1478 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1479 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1480 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1481 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1482 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1483 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1484 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1485 of inferior systems.
1487 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
1489 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1490 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1491 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1492 that wants to use flow control.
1494 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1495 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1496 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
1498 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1499 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1500 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
1502 ** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
1504 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1505 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1506 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
1508 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1509 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1510 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1511 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1512 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1513 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1514 There are several possibilities:
1516 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
1518 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1519 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
1521 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1522 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1525 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1526 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1527 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1528 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1529 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1530 tested on many kinds of terminals.
1532 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
1534 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1535 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1536 for certain terminals.
1538 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1539 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
1541 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1542 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
1544 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
1546 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1547 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1548 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1549 control on the local system.
1551 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1552 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1553 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1554 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
1556 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1557 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1558 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
1560 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1561 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1562 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1563 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
1565 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1567 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1570 ** Output from Control-V is slow.
1572 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1573 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1574 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1575 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1576 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1577 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
1579 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1580 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1581 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1582 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1583 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1584 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1585 time as the operations really take.
1587 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1588 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1589 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1590 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1591 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1592 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1593 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1594 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1595 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1596 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
1598 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1599 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1600 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1601 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1602 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1603 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1606 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1607 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1608 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
1610 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1611 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
1613 ** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
1615 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1618 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1619 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1620 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1621 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1622 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1625 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1626 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1627 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1628 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1629 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1630 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
1632 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1633 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1634 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1635 You can probably access help-command via f1.
1637 ** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
1639 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1640 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1641 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1642 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1643 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1644 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1645 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1648 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1649 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1650 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1651 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1652 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1653 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1654 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1657 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1658 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1659 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1660 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
1662 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1663 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1664 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1665 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1668 Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line
1669 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1670 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1671 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
1673 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1674 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1675 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1676 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1677 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1678 `global-font-lock-mode'.
1680 * Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
1684 *** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted.
1686 There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs to
1687 read corrupted process output.
1689 *** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption.
1691 If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupted
1692 due to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc.
1694 To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it
1695 executable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name of
1699 exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
1702 *** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1703 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1705 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1706 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1709 *** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1710 the Meta key stops working.
1712 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1713 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1714 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1715 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1716 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1717 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1718 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1720 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1721 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1722 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1723 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1724 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1727 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1729 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1730 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1732 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1734 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1735 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1736 keys can serve as Meta.
1738 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1739 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1741 *** GNU/Linux: slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1743 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1744 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1746 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1747 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1748 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1749 networked and non-networked machines.
1751 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1753 **** Networked Case.
1755 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1756 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1757 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1761 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1767 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1768 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1769 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1770 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1772 **** Non-Networked Case.
1774 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1775 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1776 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1777 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1778 file is not necessary with this approach.
1780 *** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
1782 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1783 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1784 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1785 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1786 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1787 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1788 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1791 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1792 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1793 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1794 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1795 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1796 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
1798 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1799 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1800 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1801 produce a modified terminfo entry.
1803 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1804 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
1806 *** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1808 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1809 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1810 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1811 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1813 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1817 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Environment Variables from dotfiles are ignored.
1819 When starting Emacs from the Dock or the Finder on Mac OS X, the
1820 environment variables that are set up in dotfiles, such as .cshrc or
1821 .profile, are ignored. This is because the Finder and Dock are not
1822 started from a shell, but instead from the Window Manager itself.
1824 The workaround for this is to create a .MacOSX/environment.plist file to
1825 setup these environment variables. These environment variables will
1826 apply to all processes regardless of where they are started.
1827 For me information, see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html.
1829 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Process output truncated when using ptys.
1831 There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
1832 Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
1833 leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
1835 *** Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Carbon): QuickTime 7.0.4 updater breaks build.
1837 On the above environment, build fails at the link stage with the
1838 message like "Undefined symbols: _HICopyAccessibilityActionDescription
1839 referenced from QuickTime expected to be defined in Carbon". A
1840 workaround is to use QuickTime 7.0.1 reinstaller.
1844 *** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1845 directories that have the +t bit.
1847 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1848 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1849 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1850 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1852 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1853 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1855 *** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
1857 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1858 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1859 current keymap to a file with the command
1861 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
1863 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1864 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1865 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1868 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
1870 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
1872 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
1876 *** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
1878 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
1880 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1881 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1882 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1883 but tty is giving it back 3.
1885 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1888 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
1890 should be changed to:
1892 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
1894 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1897 *** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
1899 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1900 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1901 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1902 value is just ten seconds.
1904 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
1906 *** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1907 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1909 This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1910 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1911 configures the X server.
1913 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1914 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1915 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1920 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1922 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1923 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1926 *** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1927 Emacs built with Motif.
1929 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1930 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1932 *** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
1934 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1935 rights, containing this text:
1937 --------------------------------
1938 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1939 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1940 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1945 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1947 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1948 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1950 --------------------------------
1952 *** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
1954 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1958 *** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
1960 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
1961 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
1963 *** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
1965 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
1967 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
1968 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
1970 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
1972 *** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
1973 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
1974 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
1975 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
1977 *** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
1979 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
1980 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
1981 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
1982 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
1984 *** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1985 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1987 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1988 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1989 Definitions" to make them defined.
1993 We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
1994 section on legacy systems.
1996 *** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
1998 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
1999 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2001 *** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2003 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2004 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2005 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2006 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2008 *** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
2010 We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
2011 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
2012 makes the problem stop:
2014 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
2015 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
2016 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
2017 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
2019 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
2020 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
2022 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
2023 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
2024 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
2026 *** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
2028 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
2029 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
2031 *** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
2032 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
2034 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
2036 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
2038 *** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
2039 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
2041 You can fix this by editing the file:
2043 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
2045 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
2047 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2051 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2053 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
2057 *** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
2059 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
2061 *** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
2063 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2064 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2065 to allocate ptys reliably.
2067 * Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
2069 ** Windows 95 and networking.
2071 To support server sockets, Emacs 22.1 loads ws2_32.dll. If this file
2072 is missing, all Emacs networking features are disabled.
2074 Old versions of Windows 95 may not have the required DLL. To use
2075 Emacs' networking features on Windows 95, you must install the
2076 "Windows Socket 2" update available from MicroSoft's support Web.
2078 ** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
2080 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
2081 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
2084 ** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 22.1
2086 Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameter
2087 with a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems.
2088 Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control over
2089 which font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character,
2090 use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset.
2092 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
2093 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
2094 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
2095 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
2096 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
2097 pop-up menu interaction.
2099 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
2100 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
2102 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
2103 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
2104 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
2105 after moving back into it.
2107 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
2108 not as severely as in 21.1.
2110 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
2111 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
2113 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. Some
2114 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
2115 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
2116 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
2117 work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
2118 you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
2119 the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
2120 ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
2121 appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
2124 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
2125 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
2126 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
2129 ** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
2131 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
2132 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
2133 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
2134 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
2135 or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
2137 ** Cygwin build of Emacs hangs after rebasing Cygwin DLLs
2139 Usually, on Cygwin, one needs to rebase the DLLs if an application
2140 aborts with a message like this:
2142 C:\cygwin\bin\python.exe: *** unable to remap C:\cygwin\bin\cygssl.dll to
2143 same address as parent(0xDF0000) != 0xE00000
2145 However, since Cygwin DLL 1.5.17 was released, after such rebasing,
2148 This was reported to happen for Emacs 21.2 and also for the pretest of
2149 Emacs 22.1 on Cygwin.
2151 To work around this, build Emacs like this:
2153 LDFLAGS='-Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base' ./configure
2155 make LD='$(CC)' install
2157 This produces an Emacs binary that is independent of rebasing.
2159 Note that you _must_ use LD='$(CC)' in the last two commands above, to
2160 prevent GCC from passing the "--image-base 0x20000000" option to the
2161 linker, which is what it does by default. That option produces an
2162 Emacs binary with the base address 0x20000000, which will cause Emacs
2163 to hang after Cygwin DLLs are rebased.
2165 ** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
2167 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
2168 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
2169 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
2170 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
2171 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
2173 ** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2175 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
2176 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
2177 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
2178 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
2179 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
2182 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2183 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2184 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2185 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2186 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2187 client's executable. For example:
2189 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
2191 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2192 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
2194 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
2196 ** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
2198 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2199 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
2201 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2202 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2203 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2204 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2207 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2208 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2209 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2210 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
2212 ** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2214 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2215 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2216 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2217 work when an antivirus package is installed.
2219 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2220 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2221 or disable it entirely.
2223 ** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
2225 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2226 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2227 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2228 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2229 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2230 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2231 generic mouse driver might help.
2233 ** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
2235 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2236 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2237 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2238 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
2240 ** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2241 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2242 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2245 ** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2246 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
2248 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
2250 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2251 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2252 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2253 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2254 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2255 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
2257 ** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
2259 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2260 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2261 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2262 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
2264 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2265 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2266 problem lies in the X-server settings.
2268 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2269 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2270 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2273 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2274 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2275 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2278 * Build-time problems
2282 *** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
2284 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2285 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2286 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
2288 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2289 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2290 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2291 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2292 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2293 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
2297 *** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
2299 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
2300 (RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
2301 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2302 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2303 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2304 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2305 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2306 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
2308 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2309 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2310 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2311 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
2313 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2314 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2315 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2316 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2317 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2318 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2319 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2320 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2323 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2324 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2325 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2326 to work around the problem.
2328 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2329 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2330 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2331 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
2333 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
2335 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
2337 *** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
2339 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2340 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2341 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2342 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2343 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2344 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2345 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2346 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2349 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2350 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2351 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2352 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2353 run the script like this:
2355 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
2357 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2360 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2361 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
2363 *** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2364 *** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2366 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2367 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2368 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2371 *** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2373 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2374 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2375 Emacs's configure script.
2377 *** Building a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit GNU/Linux architecture.
2379 First ensure that the necessary 32-bit system libraries and include
2380 files are installed. Then use:
2382 env CC="gcc -m32" ./configure --build=i386-linux-gnu \
2383 --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
2385 (using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system).
2387 *** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC version
2389 Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
2390 reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time. In
2391 addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
2392 info. Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
2393 compiling Emacs. GCC versions 4.0.3 and 4.1.1 reportedly build a
2394 working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend these GCC versions.
2396 *** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
2398 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2399 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2400 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2401 __MSVCRT__, like so:
2403 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
2405 *** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
2407 Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2408 to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2409 fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
2411 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
2413 The error message might be something like this:
2415 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
2416 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
2417 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
2421 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
2422 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
2423 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
2424 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
2427 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
2428 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
2429 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
2430 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
2433 *** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
2435 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2436 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2437 patch to assert.h should solve this:
2439 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2440 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2444 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2446 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
2448 #else /* debugging enabled */
2452 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2454 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
2456 #else /* debugging enabled */
2461 *** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2462 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
2464 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2465 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2466 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2467 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2468 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2471 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
2475 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2476 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
2478 *** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
2480 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2481 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2485 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2486 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2488 *** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2489 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2490 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2492 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2493 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2496 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2500 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2503 *** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2505 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2507 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2509 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2511 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2512 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2514 *** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2516 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2518 *** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
2520 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2521 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2522 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2523 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2524 does not work with this version of ncurses.
2526 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
2530 *** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
2532 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Redhat Fedora Core
2533 1 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
2534 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs tries
2535 to handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, these
2536 instructions can be useful.
2537 The work-around explained here is not enough on Fedora Core 4 (and possible
2538 newer). Read the next item.
2540 Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
2541 x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
2542 workaround is known.
2544 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
2546 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2548 It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
2549 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
2550 associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
2552 echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2554 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2555 execution of this command:
2557 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2559 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
2560 Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
2561 command when running temacs like this:
2563 setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2566 *** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.
2568 In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during
2569 `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel"
2570 item, Linux kernel shipped with Fedora Core 4 randomizes the virtual
2571 address space of a process. As the result dumping may fail even if
2572 you turn off exec-shield. In this case, use the -R option to the setarch
2575 setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2579 setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
2581 *** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
2583 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2584 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2586 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2587 space available on the machine.
2589 On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2590 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2591 for large blocks (many pages).
2593 *** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2594 *** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2595 *** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2596 *** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
2598 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2599 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2600 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2602 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2603 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2604 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2605 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2606 when unpacking the shell archive.
2608 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2609 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2610 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2612 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2613 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2615 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2616 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2617 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2618 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2619 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2620 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2621 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2622 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2623 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2624 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2625 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2627 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2629 *** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
2631 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2632 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2633 space than was allocated.
2635 This could be caused by
2636 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2637 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2638 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2639 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2640 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2641 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2643 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2644 (not from the directory you expected).
2645 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2646 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2647 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2648 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2651 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2652 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2654 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2655 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2658 *** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
2660 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2661 C backtrace printed by GDB:
2663 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2665 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2666 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2667 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2668 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
2670 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2671 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2672 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2673 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2674 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2675 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2676 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2679 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2680 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2681 know what's really going on here. */
2682 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2684 #if defined __linux__
2685 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2686 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2691 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2692 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2697 *** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
2699 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2700 supplies the `install-info' command.
2704 *** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
2706 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2707 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2708 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2709 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
2711 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
2713 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2714 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
2716 *** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2718 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2720 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2721 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2722 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2723 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2725 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2726 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2727 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2728 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2729 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2733 ** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
2735 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2736 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2737 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2738 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2740 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2742 * Runtime problems on legacy systems
2744 This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2745 If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2746 it is unlikely you will see any of these.
2748 ** Ancient operating systems
2750 AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2752 *** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2754 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2755 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2757 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2758 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2759 X11Dev... with smit.
2761 (This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2763 *** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2765 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2766 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2767 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2768 treated as control characters.
2770 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2771 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2773 *** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2775 Could not load program emacs
2776 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2777 Error was: Exec format error
2781 Could not load program .emacs
2782 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2783 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2784 Error was: Exec format error
2786 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2787 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2789 *** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
2791 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
2792 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
2796 **** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2798 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2799 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2800 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2801 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2802 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2804 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2805 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2807 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2811 SunOS 4.1.4 stopped shipping on Sep 30 1998.
2813 **** SunOS: You get linker errors
2814 ld: Undefined symbol
2815 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
2816 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
2818 **** Sun 4.0.x: M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2820 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2821 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2823 **** SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3: Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2825 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2826 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2827 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2828 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2829 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2830 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2831 obtain the destination address.
2833 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2834 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2835 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
2836 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
2837 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2838 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2839 of this writing, these official versions are available:
2841 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2842 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2843 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2844 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2845 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2847 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2848 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2850 **** Sunos 4: You get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2852 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2853 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2854 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2856 **** SunOS 4.1.3: Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
2858 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
2859 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
2860 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
2861 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
2863 **** Sunos 4.1.3: Emacs gets hung shortly after startup.
2865 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2866 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2868 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2869 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2870 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2871 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2872 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2874 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2875 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2877 **** SunOS 4: Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
2878 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
2880 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
2882 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
2883 or link libXmu statically.
2885 **** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
2887 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2888 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2889 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2890 communicating through pipes.
2894 **** Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain.
2896 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2898 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2900 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2901 Here is how to make more of them.
2905 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2907 # creates eight new pty's
2911 *** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
2913 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
2916 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
2918 *** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
2919 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
2921 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
2923 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
2924 003082 August 11, 1998.
2928 **** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
2930 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
2933 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
2935 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
2936 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
2937 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
2939 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
2941 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
2942 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
2944 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
2945 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
2949 **** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
2951 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
2952 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
2955 **** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
2957 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
2958 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
2959 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
2961 **** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
2963 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
2964 version of Solaris that you are using.
2966 **** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
2968 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
2969 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
2971 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
2973 **** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
2975 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
2976 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
2977 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
2978 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
2979 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
2981 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
2982 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
2983 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
2986 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
2987 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
2988 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
2990 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
2991 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
2993 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
2994 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2996 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
2999 **** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
3000 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
3002 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
3003 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
3006 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3011 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
3013 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3017 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
3018 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
3019 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
3020 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
3021 definition for your type of machine and system.
3023 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
3024 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
3025 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
3027 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
3028 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
3029 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
3032 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
3034 #define ThreadedX YES
3036 #define ThreadedX NO
3037 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
3038 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
3039 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
3041 **** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
3043 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
3044 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
3045 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
3046 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
3047 described in the Solaris FAQ
3048 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
3049 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
3051 **** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
3052 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
3053 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
3054 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
3055 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
3056 and the default CFLAGS.
3058 **** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
3060 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
3061 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
3062 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
3063 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
3064 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
3065 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
3066 are currently recommended for your host.
3068 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
3069 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
3070 105284-18 might fix it again.
3072 **** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
3074 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
3075 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
3076 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
3077 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
3079 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
3080 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
3081 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
3082 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
3085 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
3086 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
3089 *** HP/UX versions before 11.0
3091 HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
3092 HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
3094 **** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
3096 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
3097 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
3100 *** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
3102 See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
3104 *** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
3106 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
3107 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
3108 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
3109 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
3110 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
3111 install them and rebuild Emacs.
3113 *** Ultrix and Digital Unix
3115 **** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
3117 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
3118 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
3119 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
3122 **** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
3124 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
3125 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
3126 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
3127 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
3130 **** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
3132 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
3133 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
3134 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
3135 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
3137 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
3138 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
3140 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
3141 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
3142 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
3143 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
3147 **** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
3149 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
3150 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
3151 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
3153 **** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
3155 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
3156 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
3157 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
3159 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
3160 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
3161 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
3162 configure script) that reads:
3163 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
3164 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
3167 *** Irix 5 and earlier
3169 Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
3170 shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
3172 **** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
3174 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
3175 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
3176 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
3177 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
3180 **** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
3182 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
3183 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
3184 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
3185 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
3188 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
3191 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
3193 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
3194 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
3195 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
3196 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
3199 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
3200 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
3201 on the network that can log on to the host.
3203 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
3204 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
3205 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
3208 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
3209 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
3210 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
3211 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
3213 **** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
3215 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
3216 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
3218 **** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
3220 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
3221 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
3222 find that string, and take out the spaces.
3224 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
3226 *** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3228 **** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3230 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3231 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3232 fonts, so it does not work.
3234 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3235 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3236 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3237 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3238 resources affect Emacs also:
3240 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3241 *Background: scoBackground
3242 *Foreground: scoForeground
3244 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3245 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3247 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3248 Emacs*Background: white
3249 Emacs*Foreground: black
3251 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3252 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3253 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3254 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3255 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3256 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3257 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3258 Open Desktop display.
3260 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3261 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3263 **** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3265 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3266 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3267 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3268 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3271 **** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3273 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3274 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3275 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3276 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3277 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3278 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3280 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3281 But you have to be root to do it.
3283 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3285 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3286 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3287 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3288 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3289 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3291 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3292 These changes take effect when you reboot.
3296 **** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
3298 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3299 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3300 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
3302 **** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3303 truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
3305 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
3308 ** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3310 *** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3312 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3313 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3315 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3316 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3319 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3320 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3321 communicate with the subprocess.
3323 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3324 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3325 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3328 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3332 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3333 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3340 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3348 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3353 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3354 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3361 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3369 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3373 *** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3375 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3376 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3378 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3380 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3381 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3382 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3383 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3385 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3387 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3388 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3389 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3390 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3395 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
3397 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3398 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3399 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3400 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3401 the front of your PATH environment variable.
3403 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3406 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3407 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3408 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
3409 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
3411 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
3413 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
3415 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3416 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3417 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3418 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3419 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3420 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3421 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3422 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3423 your system works as before.
3425 *** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
3427 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3428 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3429 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3430 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3431 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
3433 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3434 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3435 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3436 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
3438 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3439 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3440 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3441 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3442 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
3444 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3445 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3446 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
3448 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3449 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3450 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
3452 *** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
3454 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
3456 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3457 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3458 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
3460 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3461 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3462 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3463 incorrect library functions.
3465 *** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3466 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
3468 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3469 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3470 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3471 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
3473 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3474 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3477 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3478 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3479 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3480 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3481 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3482 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
3483 explains this issue in more detail.
3485 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3486 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3487 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3488 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3489 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3490 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3493 ** Archaic window managers and toolkits
3495 *** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
3497 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3498 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3499 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3500 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3501 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
3503 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
3505 **** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
3507 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3508 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
3510 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
3512 ** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
3514 *** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
3516 This shell command should fix it:
3518 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
3520 *** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3523 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
3524 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
3526 * Build problems on legacy systems
3528 ** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
3530 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3531 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3534 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3535 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
3537 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3538 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
3540 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
3542 This problem manifests itself as an error message
3544 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
3546 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3547 were built for an older system version,
3549 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
3551 made the problem go away.
3553 ** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
3555 If you get errors such as
3557 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3558 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3559 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
3561 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3562 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3563 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3564 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3565 ones available when you build Emacs.
3567 ** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
3569 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
3571 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
3573 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
3575 ** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
3577 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3578 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3579 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
3581 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3582 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
3584 ** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
3586 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3587 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3588 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3589 with a floating point option other than the default.
3591 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3592 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3593 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3594 floating point option: -fsoft.
3596 ** SunOS: Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose.
3598 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
3599 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
3600 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
3601 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
3604 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
3605 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
3606 X11R4, then use it in the link.
3608 ** SunOS4, DGUX 5.4.2: --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
3610 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
3611 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
3612 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
3613 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
3614 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
3615 and Solaris in version 19.29.
3617 ** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3619 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3621 ** VMS: Compilation errors on VMS.
3623 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
3624 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
3625 This is not an error. Ignore it.
3627 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
3628 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
3630 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
3631 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
3636 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
3637 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
3638 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
3640 ** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3642 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3644 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3645 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3647 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3648 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3649 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3650 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3651 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3652 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3653 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3655 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3656 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3657 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3658 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3659 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3662 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3663 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3668 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3669 causes the problem to go away.
3670 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3671 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3673 ** 68000 C compiler problems
3675 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3676 These are some that have been observed.
3678 *** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3679 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3680 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3682 *** "cannot reclaim" error.
3684 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3685 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3686 simpler expressions.
3688 *** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3690 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3691 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3693 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3698 test ((int *) arg.y);
3701 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3702 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3703 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3705 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3706 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3708 *** C compilers lose on returning unions.
3710 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3711 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3712 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3714 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3715 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3718 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
3720 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
3721 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
3722 the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
3725 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
3726 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
3727 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
3728 GNU General Public License for more details.
3730 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
3731 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
3732 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
3733 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
3738 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"
3741 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a