1 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
4 * Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
6 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
7 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
8 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
9 dates. The preprocessor in those versions expands ".." into ". .",
10 which breaks relative file names that reference the parent directory.
12 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
13 `-traditional' option. (The `configure' script should do that
14 automatically with Emacs 21 and later.)
16 Versions of the GNU preprocessor after Feb 1 2001 reportedly don't
17 have this problem, so upgrading should solve this.
19 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
20 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefile's.
22 * Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
24 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
25 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
26 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
29 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
31 * Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
33 The error message might be something like this:
35 Converting d:/emacs-21.1/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
36 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
37 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
41 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
42 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
43 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
44 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
47 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
48 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
49 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
50 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
53 * Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
55 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
56 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
57 patch to assert.h should solve this:
59 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
60 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
64 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
66 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
68 #else /* debugging enabled */
72 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
74 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
76 #else /* debugging enabled */
79 * `put-image' and `insert-image' don't work with JPEG images
81 This can happen if Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library. Upgrading to
82 jpeg-6b reportedly solves the problem.
84 * When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
85 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
86 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
89 * Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
91 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
92 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
93 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
95 * Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
97 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and in xterm (when
98 Emacs is invoked with the `-nw' option), but this support on Unix and
99 GNU/Linux systems relies on the termcap entry to specify that the
100 display supports color. Emacs looks at the "Co" capability for the
101 terminal to find out how many colors are supported; it should be
102 non-zero to activate the color support within Emacs. (Most color
103 terminals support 8 or 16 colors.)
105 Emacs uses the termcap entry for the terminal whose name is the value
106 of the environment variable TERM. On an xterm, a common terminal
107 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
108 `xterm-color' might activate the color support.
110 When Emacs runs on MS-DOS or MS-Windows systems, it always supports
111 colors, so the above is only relevant for Unix and GNU/Linux systems.
113 Some editing modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock
114 mode. Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn
115 on Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. One easy
116 way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x global-font-lock-mode RET".
118 * Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
120 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
121 emulation for which it is set up.
123 To the best of our knowledge, only the Motif 1.2 emulation seemed to
124 be stable enough in LessTif. Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation
125 seems to work okay on FreeBSD. On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6
126 configured with "./configure --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is
127 reported to be the most successful. By contrast,
128 lesstif-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with menu
129 placement, and should probably be avoided.
131 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
132 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. The mouse still
133 moves, but will not go outside of the Emacs window (so you can't get
134 it over the frame title barm, for instance). None of the menus are
135 responsive. In addition, the keyboard will not respond. Keypresses
136 are totally ignored, including Ctrl-Alt-F1 to Ctrl-Alt-F6. This means
137 you can not even get to the virtual console.
139 We still don't know what causes these problems; they are not
140 reproducible on some systems, notably those used by Emacs developers.
142 * Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.1.
144 Emacs 21.1 built for MS-Windows doesn't support images, the tool bar,
145 and tooltips. Support for these will be added in future versions.
147 There are problems with display if the variable `redisplay-dont-pause'
148 is set to nil (w32-win.el sets it to t by default, to avoid these
149 problems). The problems include:
151 . No redisplay as long as help echo is displayed in the echo area,
152 e.g. if the mouse is on a mouse-sensitive part of the mode line.
154 . When mode line is dragged with the mouse, multiple copies of the
155 mode line are left behind, until the mouse button is released and
156 the next input event occurs.
158 . Window contents is not updated when text is selected by dragging
159 the mouse and the mouse is dragged below the bottom line of the
160 window. When the mouse button is released, the window display is
163 Again, these problems only occur if `redisplay-dont-pause' is nil.
165 Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
166 characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
168 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
169 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
171 * The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
173 This can happen because the linker by default only looks for shared
174 libraries, but jpeg distribution by default doesn't build and doesn't
175 install a shared version of the library, `libjpeg.so'. One system
176 where this is known to happen is Compaq/DEC Alpha OSF/1 v4.0, but it
177 probably isn't limited to that system alone.
179 It is possible to build Emacs linked statically, but that makes the
182 If you want to avoid building a statically linked Emacs, configure the
183 jpeg library with the `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild
184 libjpeg. This produces a shared version of libjpeg, which you need to
185 install. Finally, rerun the Emacs configure script, which should now
186 find the jpeg library.
188 (If you need the static version of the jpeg library as well, you can
189 configure libjpeg with both `--enable-static' and `--enable-shared'
192 * Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
194 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on RedHat GNU/Linux
195 using a build directory automounted from Solaris (v5.6) file server,
196 but it might not be limited to that configuration alone. Presumably,
197 the NFS server doesn't commit the files' data to disk quickly enough,
198 and the Emacs executable file is left ``busy'' for several seconds
199 after Emacs has finished dumping itself. This causes the subsequent
200 commands which invoke the dumped Emacs excutable to fail with the
203 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
204 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
205 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
206 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
208 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
209 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
210 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
211 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
212 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
213 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
214 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
215 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
218 Alternatively, when "make install" fails due to this problem, you
219 could wait for a few seconds and then type "make install" again. In
220 one particular case, waiting for 10 or more seconds seemed to work
223 * Some accented ISO-8859-1 characters or umlauts are displayed as | or _.
225 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
226 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
227 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
228 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
229 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
230 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
232 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
234 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
236 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
239 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
240 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
243 * Large file support is disabled on HP-UX. See the comments in
246 * Crashes when displaying uncompressed GIFs with version
247 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
249 * Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
251 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
252 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
253 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
254 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
255 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
257 * The W3 package (either from from the CVS sources or the last
258 release) currently (2000-12-14) doesn't run properly with Emacs 21 and
259 needs work. This patch is reported to make w3-4.0pre.46 work:
261 diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el
262 --- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el Sun Nov 14 22:00:12 1999
263 +++ w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el Thu Dec 14 14:59:15 2000
265 (dispatch-event (next-command-event)))
268 - (if (and (not (sit-for 0)) (input-pending-p))
269 + ;; modified for GNU Emacs 21 by bob@rattlesnake.com on 2000 Dec 14
270 + (if (and (not (sit-for 0)) nil)
273 (setq w3-pause-keystroke
274 diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-e21.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-e21.el
275 --- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-e21.el Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970
276 +++ w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-e21.el Thu Dec 14 14:54:58 2000
278 +;;; w3-e21.el --- ** required for GNU Emacs 21 **
279 +;; Added by bob@rattlesnake.com on 2000 Dec 14
285 * On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
286 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
287 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
288 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
290 * The PSGML package uses the obsolete variables
291 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
292 longer used by Emacs. These changes to PSGML 1.2.1 fix that.
294 --- psgml-edit.el 1999/12/17 10:55:07 1.1
295 +++ psgml-edit.el 1999/12/17 11:36:37
298 - (before-change-function nil)
299 - (after-change-function nil))
300 + (before-change-functions nil)
301 + (after-change-functions nil))
302 (setq selective-display t)
303 @@ -1474,3 +1474,3 @@
304 (buffer-read-only nil)
305 - (before-change-function nil)
306 + (before-change-functions nil)
307 (markup-index ; match-data index in tag regexp
308 @@ -1526,3 +1526,3 @@
309 (defun sgml-expand-shortref-to-text (name)
310 - (let (before-change-function
311 + (let (before-change-functions
312 (entity (sgml-lookup-entity name (sgml-dtd-entities sgml-dtd-info))))
313 @@ -1543,3 +1543,3 @@
315 - before-change-function)
316 + before-change-functions)
317 (goto-char sgml-markup-start)
318 @@ -1576,3 +1576,3 @@
319 (goto-char (sgml-element-end element))
320 - (let ((before-change-function nil))
321 + (let ((before-change-functions nil))
322 (sgml-normalize-content element only-one)))
323 --- psgml-other.el 1999/12/17 10:40:02 1.1
324 +++ psgml-other.el 1999/12/17 11:30:43
327 +(eval-when-compile (require 'cl))
331 - (subseq entries 0 (min (length entries)
332 - sgml-max-menu-size))))
333 +;;; (subseq entries 0 (min (length entries)
334 +;;; sgml-max-menu-size))
335 + (let ((new (copy-sequence entries)))
336 + (setcdr (nthcdr (1- (min (length entries)
337 + sgml-max-menu-size))
340 (setq entries (nthcdr sgml-max-menu-size entries))
342 (let ((inhibit-read-only t)
343 - (after-change-function nil) ; obsolete variable
344 - (before-change-function nil) ; obsolete variable
345 (after-change-functions nil)
346 - (before-change-functions nil))
347 - (put-text-property start end 'face face)))
348 + (before-change-functions nil)
349 + (modified (buffer-modified-p))
350 + (buffer-undo-list t)
352 + (put-text-property start end 'face face)
353 + (when (and (not modified) (buffer-modified-p))
354 + (set-buffer-modified-p nil))))
356 --- psgml-parse.el 1999/12/17 10:32:45 1.1
357 +++ psgml-parse.el 2000/12/05 17:12:34
360 +(eval-when-compile (require 'cl))
363 @@ -2474,8 +2476,8 @@
364 (setq sgml-scratch-buffer nil))
365 - (when after-change-function ;***
366 - (message "OOPS: after-change-function not NIL in scratch buffer %s: %s"
367 + (when after-change-functions ;***
368 + (message "OOPS: after-change-functions not NIL in scratch buffer %s: %S"
370 - after-change-function)
371 - (setq before-change-function nil
372 - after-change-function nil))
373 + after-change-functions)
374 + (setq before-change-functions nil
375 + after-change-functions nil))
376 (setq sgml-last-entity-buffer (current-buffer))
377 @@ -2846,6 +2848,5 @@
378 "Set initial state of parsing"
379 - (make-local-variable 'before-change-function)
380 - (setq before-change-function 'sgml-note-change-at)
381 - (make-local-variable 'after-change-function)
382 - (setq after-change-function 'sgml-set-face-after-change)
383 + (set (make-local-variable 'before-change-functions) '(sgml-note-change-at))
384 + (set (make-local-variable 'after-change-functions)
385 + '(sgml-set-face-after-change))
386 (sgml-set-active-dtd-indicator (sgml-dtd-doctype dtd))
387 @@ -3887,7 +3888,7 @@
389 - (unless before-change-function
390 - (message "WARN: before-change-function has been lost, restoring (%s)"
391 + (unless before-change-functions
392 + (message "WARN: before-change-functions has been lost, restoring (%s)"
394 - (setq before-change-function 'sgml-note-change-at)
395 - (setq after-change-function 'sgml-set-face-after-change)
396 + (setq before-change-functions '(sgml-note-change-at))
397 + (setq after-change-functions '(sgml-set-face-after-change))
400 * The Calc package fails to build and signals errors with Emacs 21.
402 Apply the following patches which reportedly fix several problems:
404 --- calc-ext.el.~1~ Sun Apr 3 02:26:34 1994
405 +++ calc-ext.el Wed Sep 18 17:35:01 1996
406 @@ -1354,6 +1354,25 @@
407 (calc-fancy-prefix 'calc-inverse-flag "Inverse..." n)
410 +(defconst calc-fancy-prefix-map
411 + (let ((map (make-sparse-keymap)))
412 + (define-key map [t] 'calc-fancy-prefix-other-key)
413 + (define-key map (vector meta-prefix-char t) 'calc-fancy-prefix-other-key)
414 + (define-key map [switch-frame] nil)
415 + (define-key map [?\C-u] 'universal-argument)
416 + (define-key map [?0] 'digit-argument)
417 + (define-key map [?1] 'digit-argument)
418 + (define-key map [?2] 'digit-argument)
419 + (define-key map [?3] 'digit-argument)
420 + (define-key map [?4] 'digit-argument)
421 + (define-key map [?5] 'digit-argument)
422 + (define-key map [?6] 'digit-argument)
423 + (define-key map [?7] 'digit-argument)
424 + (define-key map [?8] 'digit-argument)
425 + (define-key map [?9] 'digit-argument)
427 + "Keymap used while processing calc-fancy-prefix.")
429 (defun calc-fancy-prefix (flag msg n)
432 @@ -1364,6 +1383,8 @@
433 (message (if prefix msg "")))
435 (not calc-is-keypad-press)
436 + (if (boundp 'overriding-terminal-local-map)
437 + (setq overriding-terminal-local-map calc-fancy-prefix-map)
438 (let ((event (calc-read-key t)))
439 (if (eq (setq last-command-char (car event)) ?\C-u)
441 @@ -1376,9 +1397,18 @@
442 (if (or (not (integerp last-command-char))
443 (eq last-command-char ?-))
444 (calc-unread-command)
445 - (digit-argument n))))))
446 + (digit-argument n)))))))
448 (setq calc-is-keypad-press nil)
450 +(defun calc-fancy-prefix-other-key (arg)
452 + (if (or (not (integerp last-command-char))
453 + (and (>= last-command-char 0) (< last-command-char ? )
454 + (not (eq last-command-char meta-prefix-char))))
455 + (calc-wrapper)) ; clear flags if not a Calc command.
456 + (calc-unread-command)
457 + (setq overriding-terminal-local-map nil))
459 (defun calc-invert-func ()
462 --- Makefile.~1~ Sun Dec 15 23:50:45 1996
463 +++ Makefile Thu Nov 30 15:09:45 2000
468 -MAINT = -l calc-maint.elc
469 +MAINT = -l calc-maint.el
471 # Control whether intermediate files are kept.
476 # All this because "-l calc-maint" doesn't work.
477 -maint: calc-maint.elc
478 -calc-maint.elc: calc-maint.el
479 - cp calc-maint.el calc-maint.elc
481 +maint: calc-maint.el
483 # Create an Emacs TAGS file
486 --- calc-aent.el.~1~ Sun Dec 15 23:50:36 1996
487 +++ calc-aent.el Tue Nov 21 18:34:33 2000
489 (calc-minibuffer-contains
490 "\\`\\([^\"]*\"[^\"]*\"\\)*[^\"]*\"[^\"]*\\'"))
492 - (setq alg-exp (buffer-string))
493 + (setq alg-exp (field-string))
494 (and (> (length alg-exp) 0) (setq calc-previous-alg-entry alg-exp))
497 @@ -393,14 +393,14 @@
499 (defun calcAlg-enter ()
501 - (let* ((str (buffer-string))
502 + (let* ((str (field-string))
503 (exp (and (> (length str) 0)
505 (set-buffer calc-buffer)
506 (math-read-exprs str)))))
507 (if (eq (car-safe exp) 'error)
509 - (goto-char (point-min))
510 + (goto-char (field-beginning))
511 (forward-char (nth 1 exp))
513 (calc-temp-minibuffer-message
514 @@ -455,14 +455,14 @@
516 (if (calc-minibuffer-contains ".*[@oh] *[^'m ]+[^'m]*\\'")
518 - (setq calc-digit-value (buffer-string))
519 + (setq calc-digit-value (field-string))
523 (defun calcDigit-edit ()
525 (calc-unread-command)
526 - (setq calc-digit-value (buffer-string))
527 + (setq calc-digit-value (field-string))
531 --- calc.el.~1~ Sun Dec 15 23:50:47 1996
532 +++ calc.el Wed Nov 22 13:08:49 2000
533 @@ -2051,11 +2051,11 @@
534 ;; Exercise for the reader: Figure out why this is a good precaution!
535 (or (boundp 'calc-buffer)
536 (use-local-map minibuffer-local-map))
537 - (let ((str (buffer-string)))
538 + (let ((str (field-string)))
539 (setq calc-digit-value (save-excursion
540 (set-buffer calc-buffer)
541 (math-read-number str))))
542 - (if (and (null calc-digit-value) (> (buffer-size) 0))
543 + (if (and (null calc-digit-value) (> (field-end) (field-beginning)))
546 (calc-temp-minibuffer-message " [Bad format]"))
547 @@ -2071,7 +2071,7 @@
549 (defun calc-minibuffer-contains (rex)
551 - (goto-char (point-min))
552 + (goto-char (field-end (point-min)))
556 @@ -2158,10 +2158,8 @@
557 (upcase last-command-char))))
561 - (goto-char (point-min))
563 - "[-+]?\\(.*\\+/- *\\|.*mod *\\)?\\([0-9]+\\.?0*[@oh] *\\)?\\([0-9]+\\.?0*['m] *\\)?[0-9]*\\(\\.?[0-9]*\\(e[-+]?[0-3]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?\\)?\\|[0-9]:\\([0-9]+:\\)?[0-9]*\\)?[\"s]?\\'")))
564 + (calc-minibuffer-contains
565 + "[-+]?\\(.*\\+/- *\\|.*mod *\\)?\\([0-9]+\\.?0*[@oh] *\\)?\\([0-9]+\\.?0*['m] *\\)?[0-9]*\\(\\.?[0-9]*\\(e[-+]?[0-3]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?[0-9]?\\)?\\|[0-9]:\\([0-9]+:\\)?[0-9]*\\)?[\"s]?\\'"))
566 (if (and (memq last-command-char '(?@ ?o ?h ?\' ?m))
567 (string-match " " calc-hms-format))
569 @@ -2190,7 +2188,7 @@
570 ((eq last-command 'calcDigit-start)
572 (t (backward-delete-char 1)))
573 - (if (= (buffer-size) 0)
574 + (if (= (field-beginning) (field-end))
576 (setq last-command-char 13)
577 (calcDigit-nondigit)))
579 * TeX'ing the Calc manual fails.
581 The following patches allow to build the Calc manual using texinfo.tex
582 from Emacs 19.34 distribution:
584 *** calc-maint.e~0 Mon Dec 16 07:11:26 1996
585 --- calc-maint.el Sun Dec 10 14:32:38 2000
589 "\\global\\advance\\appendixno2\n"
590 "\\gdef\\xref#1.{See ``#1.''}\n")
591 ! (setq midpos (point))
592 (insert "@end tex\n")
593 (insert-buffer-substring srcbuf sumpos endpos)
597 "\\global\\advance\\appendixno2\n"
598 "\\gdef\\xref#1.{See ``#1.''}\n")
599 ! (setq midpos (point-marker))
600 (insert "@end tex\n")
601 (insert-buffer-substring srcbuf sumpos endpos)
603 *** Makefile.~0 Mon Dec 16 07:11:24 1996
604 --- Makefile Sun Dec 10 14:44:00 2000
607 # Format the Calc manual as one printable volume using TeX.
610 ! $(TEX) calc.texinfo
611 $(TEXINDEX) calc.[cfkptv]?
612 ! $(TEX) calc.texinfo
613 $(PURGE) calc.cp calc.fn calc.pg calc.tp calc.vr
614 $(PURGE) calc.cps calc.fns calc.kys calc.pgs calc.tps calc.vrs
617 # Format the Calc manual as one printable volume using TeX.
620 ! -$(TEX) calc.texinfo
621 $(TEXINDEX) calc.[cfkptv]?
622 ! -$(TEX) calc.texinfo
623 $(PURGE) calc.cp calc.fn calc.pg calc.tp calc.vr
624 $(PURGE) calc.cps calc.fns calc.kys calc.pgs calc.tps calc.vrs
626 *** calc.texinfo.~1~ Thu Oct 10 18:18:56 1996
627 --- calc.texinfo Mon Dec 11 08:25:00 2000
631 % Because makeinfo.c exists, we can't just define new commands.
632 % So instead, we take over little-used existing commands.
634 + % Suggested by Karl Berry <karl@@freefriends.org>
635 + \gdef\!{\mskip-\thinmuskip}
636 % Redefine @cite{text} to act like $text$ in regular TeX.
637 % Info will typeset this same as @samp{text}.
638 \gdef\goodtex{\tex \let\rm\goodrm \let\t\ttfont \turnoffactive}
641 a vector of the actual parameter values, written as equations:
642 @cite{[a = 3, b = 2]}, in case you'd rather read them in a list
643 than pick them out of the formula. (You can type @kbd{t y}
644 ! to move this vector to the stack; @pxref{Trail Commands})
646 Specifying a different independent variable name will affect the
647 resulting formula: @kbd{a F 1 k RET} produces @kbd{3 + 2 k}.
649 a vector of the actual parameter values, written as equations:
650 @cite{[a = 3, b = 2]}, in case you'd rather read them in a list
651 than pick them out of the formula. (You can type @kbd{t y}
652 ! to move this vector to the stack; see @ref{Trail Commands}.)
654 Specifying a different independent variable name will affect the
655 resulting formula: @kbd{a F 1 k RET} produces @kbd{3 + 2 k}.
657 * The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
659 It seems that `oc-unicode' introduces 5 2-dimensional charsets to
660 cover the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane) subset of Unicode. However,
661 Emacs 21 adds three mule-unicode-xxxx-yyyy charsets and one
662 japanese-jisx0213-2 in the private charset area of the Mule character
663 representation. This leaves only one free slot left for additional
664 dimension-2 charsets, which is not enough for `oc-unicode'.
666 The solution is to modify `oc-unicode' to use the Emacs mule-unicode-*
667 charsets. We don't yet have a patch for that.
669 * On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
670 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
671 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
672 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
673 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
675 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
676 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
679 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
680 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
681 specified run-time search path in the executable.
683 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
685 * On Solaris 2.7, building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
686 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
687 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
688 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
689 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
690 and the default CFLAGS.
692 * On Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
694 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
695 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
696 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
697 ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/windows/emacs/doc/index.html
699 * Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
700 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
701 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
704 * On OSF/Dec Unix/Tru64/<whatever it is this year> under X locally or
705 remotely, M-SPC acts as a `compose' key with strange results. See
708 Changing Alt_L to Meta_L fixes it:
709 % xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L'
710 % xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R'
712 * Error "conflicting types for `initstate'" compiling with GCC on Irix 6.
714 Install GCC 2.95 or a newer version, and this problem should go away.
715 It is possible that this problem results from upgrading the operating
716 system without reinstalling GCC; so you could also try reinstalling
717 the same version of GCC, and telling us whether that fixes the problem.
719 * On Solaris 7, Emacs gets a segmentation fault when starting up using X.
721 This results from Sun patch 107058-01 (SunOS 5.7: Patch for
722 assembler) if you use GCC version 2.7 or later.
723 To work around it, either install patch 106950-03 or later,
724 or uninstall patch 107058-01, or install the GNU Binutils.
725 Then recompile Emacs, and it should work.
727 * With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
729 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
731 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
732 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
734 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
735 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
736 /******************************************************************
738 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
745 + char* begin = NULL;
749 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
752 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
754 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
755 + if (begin != NULL) {
756 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
760 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
765 * Emacs crashes on Irix 6.5 on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
767 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
769 * Emacs crashes in utmpname on Irix 5.3.
771 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
772 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
774 * The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
776 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
777 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
778 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
779 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
782 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
783 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
785 * On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
786 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
788 You can fix this by editing the file:
790 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
792 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
794 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
798 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
800 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
802 * Emacs on Digital Unix 4.0 fails to build, giving error message
803 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
805 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
806 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
808 * Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
810 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
811 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
812 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
814 * Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
816 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
817 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
818 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
819 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
822 * When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
824 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
825 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
826 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
827 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
828 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
830 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
831 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
833 * Failure in unexec while dumping emacs on Digital Unix 4.0
835 This problem manifests itself as an error message
837 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
839 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
840 were built for an older system version,
842 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
844 made the problem go away.
846 * No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
848 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
851 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
853 * As of version 20.4, Emacs doesn't work properly if configured for
854 the Motif toolkit and linked against the free LessTif library. The
855 next Emacs release is expected to work with LessTif.
857 * Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
859 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
860 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
863 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
865 * Emacs makes HPUX 11.0 crash.
867 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
869 * Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine (HPUX 10.20).
871 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
873 * The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
874 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
875 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
876 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
878 * Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
879 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
880 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
883 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
884 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
885 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
886 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
888 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
889 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
890 + (insert-file-contents entity)
891 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
892 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
893 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
895 * Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUC TeX installed.
897 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUC TeX; upgrading should solve
900 * Running TeX from AUC TeX package with Emacs 20.3 gives a Lisp error
901 about a read-only tex output buffer.
903 This problem appeared for AUC TeX version 9.9j and some earlier
904 versions. Here is a patch for the file tex-buf.el in the AUC TeX
907 diff -c auctex/tex-buf.el~ auctex/tex-buf.el
908 *** auctex/tex-buf.el~ Wed Jul 29 18:35:32 1998
909 --- auctex/tex-buf.el Sat Sep 5 15:20:38 1998
912 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
913 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
914 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
915 ! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer)
918 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
920 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
921 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
922 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
923 ! (let (temp-buffer-show-function temp-buffer-show-hook)
924 ! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer))
927 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
929 * On Irix 6.3, substituting environment variables in file names
930 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
932 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
934 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
935 003082 August 11, 1998.
937 * After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
939 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
940 (standard-display-european t)
941 That should be changed to
942 (standard-display-european 1 t)
944 * Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
946 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
947 supplies the `install-info' command.
949 * Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key, on HPUX.
951 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
952 rights, containing this text:
954 --------------------------------
955 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
956 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
957 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
962 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
964 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
965 add mod2 = Mode_switch
967 --------------------------------
969 * Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
970 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
971 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
973 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
974 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
975 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
977 * M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
979 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
980 for character composition.
982 * Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
984 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
985 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
986 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
989 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
991 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
993 * Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs on Digital Unix 4.0.
995 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
996 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
997 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
998 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
1001 * When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
1003 This can happen if you compiled Ispell to use ASCII characters only
1004 and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII characters,
1005 specifically Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
1008 This can also happen if the version of Ispell installed on your
1011 * On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1012 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1014 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1015 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1018 * On Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
1019 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
1021 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
1023 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
1024 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
1025 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
1026 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
1027 AltGr has been pressed.
1029 * Under some Windows X-servers, Emacs' display is incorrect
1031 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
1032 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
1033 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
1034 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
1036 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions as
1037 well. The problem lies in the X-server settings.
1039 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
1040 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
1041 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
1044 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
1045 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
1046 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
1049 * On Solaris 2, Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
1051 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
1052 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
1053 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
1054 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
1055 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
1056 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
1057 are currently recommended for your host.
1059 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
1060 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
1061 105284-18 might fix it again.
1063 * On Solaris 2.6 and 7, the Compose key does not work.
1065 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
1066 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
1067 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
1068 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
1070 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
1071 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
1072 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
1073 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
1076 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
1077 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
1080 * Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
1082 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
1083 either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
1084 calls for specifying this.
1086 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
1087 mail-host-address to the value you want.
1089 * Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs, on UnixWare 2.1
1091 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
1092 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
1093 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
1094 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
1095 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
1096 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
1098 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
1099 But you have to be root to do it.
1101 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
1103 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
1104 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
1105 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
1106 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
1107 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
1109 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
1110 These changes take effect when you reboot.
1112 * Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1114 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1115 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1116 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1117 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1119 Here's how to do this:
1121 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1123 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1124 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1127 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1129 * Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
1131 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
1132 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
1133 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
1135 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
1136 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
1137 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
1139 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
1140 display all the characters Emacs supports.
1142 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
1143 missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
1144 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
1145 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
1146 of this character to display a space.
1148 * Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
1150 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
1152 * Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
1154 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
1155 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
1156 lines do not overlap.
1158 * You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
1159 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
1161 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
1162 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
1163 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
1165 * In FreeBSD 2.1.5, useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1166 directories that have the +t bit.
1168 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1169 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1170 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1171 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1173 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1174 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1176 * When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1177 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1179 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1181 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1183 * Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
1186 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
1187 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
1188 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
1189 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
1190 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
1191 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
1193 * "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
1195 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
1196 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
1197 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
1198 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
1199 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
1200 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
1202 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
1203 them to two different keys.
1205 * Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup, on AIX4.2.
1207 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
1208 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
1210 * movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
1212 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
1213 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
1214 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
1215 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
1216 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
1219 * Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
1221 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
1222 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
1223 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
1224 happens to exist on your X server).
1226 * Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
1228 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
1229 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
1230 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
1232 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
1233 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
1235 * Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on HPUX 9 after you delete a frame.
1237 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
1238 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
1241 * Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1243 We suspect that this is a similar bug in the X libraries provided by
1244 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1245 makes the problem stop:
1247 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1248 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1249 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1250 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1252 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1253 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1255 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1256 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1257 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1259 * Problems running Perl under Emacs on Windows NT/95.
1261 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
1262 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
1264 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
1265 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
1268 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
1269 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
1270 communicate with the subprocess.
1272 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
1273 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
1274 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
1277 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
1281 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
1282 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
1289 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1297 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1302 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
1303 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
1310 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1318 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1322 * Problems running DOS programs on Windows NT versions earlier than 3.51.
1324 Some DOS programs, such as pkzip/pkunzip will not work at all, while
1325 others will only work if their stdin is redirected from a file or NUL.
1327 When a DOS program does not work, a new process is actually created, but
1328 hangs. It cannot be interrupted from Emacs, and might need to be killed
1329 by an external program if Emacs is hung waiting for the process to
1330 finish. If Emacs is not waiting for it, you should be able to kill the
1331 instance of ntvdm that is running the hung process from Emacs, if you
1332 can find out the process id.
1334 It is safe to run most DOS programs using call-process (eg. M-! and
1335 M-|) since stdin is then redirected from a file, but not with
1336 start-process since that redirects stdin to a pipe. Also, running DOS
1337 programs in a shell buffer prompt without redirecting stdin does not
1340 * Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs:
1342 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
1344 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
1345 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
1346 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
1348 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
1349 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
1350 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
1351 incorrect library functions.
1353 * When compiling with DJGPP on Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
1356 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
1357 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
1358 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
1359 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
1361 * Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
1362 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
1363 (Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
1364 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
1365 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
1366 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.)
1368 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
1369 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
1370 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
1371 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
1372 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
1373 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
1374 explains this issue in more detail.
1376 * Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
1378 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
1380 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
1381 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
1382 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
1383 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
1384 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
1385 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
1386 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
1387 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
1388 your system works as before.
1390 * On Windows 95, Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
1392 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
1393 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
1395 * Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on Windows 95.
1397 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1398 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
1399 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way.
1401 * `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
1403 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
1404 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
1405 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
1406 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
1407 does not work with this version of ncurses.
1409 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
1411 * Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
1413 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
1414 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
1417 * Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly truncated
1418 on GNU/Linux systems.
1420 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
1423 * Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1425 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1426 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1427 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1428 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1430 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1432 * On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
1434 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
1435 version of Solaris that you are using.
1437 * Emacs dumps core on startup, on Solaris.
1439 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
1440 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
1441 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
1442 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
1443 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
1445 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
1446 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
1447 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
1450 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
1451 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
1452 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
1454 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
1455 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
1457 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
1458 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1460 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
1463 * Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called, on Solaris.
1465 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
1466 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
1467 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
1469 * "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes on HPUX, in
1470 Emacs built with Motif.
1472 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1473 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1475 * On Irix 6.0, make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi
1477 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
1478 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
1479 find that string, and take out the spaces.
1481 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
1483 * "out of virtual swap space" on Irix 5.3
1485 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
1486 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
1487 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
1488 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
1491 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
1494 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
1496 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
1497 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
1498 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
1499 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
1502 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
1503 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
1504 on the network that can log on to the host.
1506 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
1507 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
1508 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
1511 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
1512 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
1513 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
1514 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
1516 * With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
1517 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
1519 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
1520 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
1521 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
1523 * On SunOS 4.1.3, Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
1525 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
1526 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
1527 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
1528 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
1530 * On SunOS 4, Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
1531 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
1533 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
1535 * On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1536 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1538 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1539 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1540 Definitions" to make them defined.
1542 * On SunOS, you get linker errors
1543 ld: Undefined symbol
1544 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
1545 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
1547 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
1548 or link libXmu statically.
1550 * On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as
1551 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
1552 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
1554 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
1555 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
1558 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
1562 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
1565 * Unpredictable segmentation faults on Solaris 2.3 and 2.4.
1567 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
1568 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
1570 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
1572 * Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for
1575 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
1576 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
1579 * Emacs crashes at startup on MSDOS.
1581 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
1582 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
1583 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
1584 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
1585 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
1587 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
1588 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
1589 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
1590 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
1592 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
1593 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
1594 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
1595 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
1596 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
1598 * A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
1600 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
1601 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
1603 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
1605 * Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
1607 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
1608 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
1609 Emacs's configure script.
1611 * Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
1613 This results from a bug in GNU Sed version 2.03. To solve the
1614 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
1617 * On Sunos 4.1.1, there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
1619 If you get errors such as
1621 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1622 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1623 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
1625 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
1626 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
1627 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
1628 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
1629 ones available when you build Emacs.
1631 * The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1632 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1634 This is because HPUX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1635 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1636 configures the X server.
1638 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1639 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1640 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1645 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1647 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1648 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1651 * The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
1653 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
1654 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
1655 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
1656 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
1657 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
1659 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
1661 * Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1663 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1664 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1666 * Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys.
1668 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
1669 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
1670 to allocate ptys reliably.
1672 * On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
1674 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
1675 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
1676 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
1677 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
1680 * Slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1682 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1683 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1685 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1686 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1687 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1688 networked and non-networked machines.
1690 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1694 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1695 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1696 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1700 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1706 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1707 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1708 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1709 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1711 ** Non-Networked Case
1713 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1714 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1715 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1716 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1717 file is not necessary with this approach.
1719 * On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
1720 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
1722 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
1723 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
1726 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
1731 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
1733 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
1737 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
1738 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
1739 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
1740 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
1741 definition for your type of machine and system.
1743 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
1744 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
1745 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
1747 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
1748 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
1749 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
1752 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
1754 #define ThreadedX YES
1756 #define ThreadedX NO
1757 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
1758 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
1759 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
1761 * With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
1762 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
1764 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
1765 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
1766 another escape character in kermit. One user did
1768 set escape-character 17
1770 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
1772 * The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1774 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1776 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1778 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1779 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1780 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1781 the resource prevents the problem.
1783 * Emacs gets hung shortly after startup, on Sunos 4.1.3.
1785 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
1786 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
1788 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
1789 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
1790 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
1791 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
1792 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
1794 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
1795 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1797 * Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
1799 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
1800 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
1801 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
1802 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
1803 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
1804 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
1805 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
1806 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
1809 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
1810 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
1811 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
1812 same directory where system header files are kept.
1814 * On Solaris 2.x, GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported"
1816 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
1817 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
1818 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
1819 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
1820 described in the Solaris FAQ
1821 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
1822 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
1824 * The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
1826 This shell command should fix it:
1828 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
1830 * Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
1832 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
1833 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
1834 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
1835 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
1838 * On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
1840 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
1841 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
1842 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
1844 * You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
1846 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1847 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1848 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1851 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1852 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1853 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1854 workaround can be found.
1856 * Unusable default font on SCO 3.2v4.
1858 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
1859 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
1860 fonts, so it does not work.
1862 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
1863 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
1864 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
1865 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
1866 resources affect Emacs also:
1868 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
1869 *Background: scoBackground
1870 *Foreground: scoForeground
1872 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
1873 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
1875 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
1876 Emacs*Background: white
1877 Emacs*Foreground: black
1879 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
1880 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
1881 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
1882 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
1883 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
1884 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
1885 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
1886 Open Desktop display.
1888 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
1889 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
1891 * rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
1893 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
1894 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
1896 * Emacs is slow using X11R5 on HP/UX.
1898 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
1899 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
1900 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
1901 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
1902 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
1903 install them and rebuild Emacs.
1905 * Loading fonts is very slow.
1907 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
1908 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
1909 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
1912 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
1913 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
1915 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
1916 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
1917 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
1919 * On AIX 3.2.4, releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
1921 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
1922 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
1923 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
1924 treated as control characters.
1926 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
1927 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
1929 * display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
1931 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
1932 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
1933 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
1934 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
1935 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
1937 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
1938 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
1940 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
1942 * On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
1944 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
1945 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
1947 * Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
1948 segmentation fault and core dump.
1950 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
1951 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
1953 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
1955 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
1958 * Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
1960 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
1962 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
1964 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
1966 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
1967 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
1969 * Link failure on IBM AIX 1.3 ptf 0013.
1971 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
1972 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
1976 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
1977 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
1979 * Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose on a Sun.
1981 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
1982 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
1983 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
1984 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
1987 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
1988 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
1989 X11R4, then use it in the link.
1991 * Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'
1993 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
1994 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
1995 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
1996 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
1998 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2000 * In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
2002 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
2003 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
2004 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
2005 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
2008 if ($EMACS == "t") then
2010 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
2014 * An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
2015 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
2017 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
2019 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
2020 that isn't a color.)
2022 The fix is to correct your X resources.
2024 * Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1 using --with-x-toolkit.
2026 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
2027 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
2028 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
2030 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
2031 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
2033 * Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
2035 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
2036 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
2037 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
2039 * src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2041 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2042 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.
2044 * Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
2046 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
2047 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
2048 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
2051 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
2052 your font path, like this:
2054 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
2056 * Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
2058 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
2060 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
2062 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
2063 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
2064 want, rewrite the resource.
2066 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
2067 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
2068 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
2070 * --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
2072 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
2073 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
2074 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
2075 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
2076 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
2077 and Solaris in version 19.29.
2079 * `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2081 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2082 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2083 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2086 * --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong on BSD/386.
2088 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
2089 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
2092 * Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies, on Sunos 5.3.
2094 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2095 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2096 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2097 communicating through pipes.
2099 * Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2101 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2102 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2103 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2104 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2105 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2106 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2107 obtain the destination address.
2109 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2110 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2111 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
2112 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
2113 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2114 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2115 of this writing, these official versions are available:
2117 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2118 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2119 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2120 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2121 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2123 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2124 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2126 * On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs:
2128 Could not load program emacs
2129 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2130 Error was: Exec format error
2134 Could not load program .emacs
2135 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2136 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2137 Error was: Exec format error
2139 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2140 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2142 * On AIX, you get this compiler error message:
2144 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2145 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2147 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2148 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2149 X11Dev... with smit.
2151 * You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
2153 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
2154 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
2155 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
2156 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
2158 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
2160 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
2162 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
2163 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
2164 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
2166 * C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
2168 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
2169 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
2170 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
2172 * Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
2174 These control the actions of Emacs.
2175 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
2176 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
2179 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
2180 of them, then try again.
2182 * After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2184 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2185 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2186 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2188 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2189 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2190 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2191 configure script) that reads:
2192 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2193 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2196 * Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
2197 directly with an X server.
2199 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
2200 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
2201 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
2202 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
2203 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
2204 have made the key binding correctly.
2206 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
2207 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
2208 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
2211 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
2213 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
2214 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
2216 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
2217 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
2218 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
2219 modifier bit not otherwise used.
2221 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
2222 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
2223 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
2224 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
2226 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
2227 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
2229 * `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'
2231 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
2232 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
2233 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
2234 value is just ten seconds.
2236 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
2238 * `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2240 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2241 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2242 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2243 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2245 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2246 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2248 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2249 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2250 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2251 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2253 * On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2255 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2256 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2257 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2259 * Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2261 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2263 * Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
2264 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
2265 * Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
2266 * GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
2268 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
2269 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
2270 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
2271 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
2273 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
2274 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
2276 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
2277 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
2279 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
2281 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
2282 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
2283 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
2284 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
2285 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
2286 be careful not to lose the others.
2288 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
2290 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
2292 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
2293 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
2296 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
2298 * On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
2300 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
2302 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
2304 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
2306 * Self documentation messages are garbled.
2308 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
2309 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
2310 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
2312 * Trouble using ptys on AIX.
2314 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2315 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2317 * Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
2319 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
2321 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
2322 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
2323 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
2324 but tty is giving it back 3.
2326 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
2329 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
2331 should be changed to:
2333 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
2335 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
2338 * Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
2340 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
2342 * Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
2343 * `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
2345 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
2346 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
2349 * Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
2351 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
2352 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
2353 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
2354 with a floating point option other than the default.
2356 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
2357 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
2358 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
2359 floating point option: -fsoft.
2361 * Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
2363 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
2364 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
2365 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
2367 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
2368 whether this problem is present on a given system.
2370 * Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
2373 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
2374 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
2376 * M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2378 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2379 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2381 * Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
2384 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
2385 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
2386 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
2389 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
2390 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
2391 it only if it is undefined.
2393 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
2395 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
2396 happen in a non-login shell.
2398 * X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
2400 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
2401 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
2402 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
2403 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
2405 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
2406 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
2407 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
2409 The easy way to do this is to put
2411 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
2413 in your site-init.el file.
2415 * Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2417 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2418 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2419 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2420 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2422 * Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
2424 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2426 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2428 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2429 Here is how to make more of them.
2433 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2435 # creates eight new pty's
2437 * Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
2439 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2440 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2442 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2443 space available on the machine.
2445 On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2446 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2447 for large blocks (many pages).
2449 * test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
2450 * or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
2451 * or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2452 * or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs
2454 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2455 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2456 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2458 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2459 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2460 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2461 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2462 when unpacking the shell archive.
2464 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2465 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2466 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2468 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2469 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2471 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2472 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2473 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2474 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2475 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2476 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2477 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2478 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2479 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2480 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2481 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2483 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2485 * temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
2487 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2488 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2489 space than was allocated.
2491 This could be caused by
2492 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2493 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2494 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2495 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2496 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2497 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2499 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2500 (not from the directory you expected).
2501 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2502 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2503 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2504 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2507 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2508 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2510 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2511 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2514 * Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
2516 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
2517 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
2518 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
2519 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
2521 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
2522 than the corresponding .el file.
2524 * The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2526 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2528 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2529 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2530 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2531 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2533 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2534 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2535 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2536 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2537 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2539 * Compilation errors on VMS.
2541 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
2542 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
2543 This is not an error. Ignore it.
2545 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
2546 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
2548 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
2549 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
2554 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
2555 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
2556 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
2558 * rmail gets error getting new mail
2560 rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
2561 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
2562 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
2564 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
2565 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
2566 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
2567 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
2568 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
2569 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
2570 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
2572 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2573 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2574 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2575 `mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
2580 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2581 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2582 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2583 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
2589 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
2590 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
2591 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
2592 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
2593 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
2594 directory copy is ineffective.
2596 * Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
2598 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
2599 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
2600 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
2601 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
2602 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
2603 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
2604 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
2605 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
2607 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
2609 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
2610 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
2611 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
2613 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
2614 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
2615 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
2616 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
2617 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
2618 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
2620 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
2621 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
2622 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
2623 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
2624 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
2625 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
2626 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
2627 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
2628 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
2630 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
2631 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
2632 codes. You might as well try it.
2634 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
2635 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
2636 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
2637 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
2638 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
2639 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
2640 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
2641 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
2643 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
2644 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
2645 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
2646 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
2647 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
2650 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
2651 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
2652 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
2653 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
2654 other control characters are already used by emacs.
2656 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
2657 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
2660 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
2661 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
2662 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
2663 automatically. Here is an example:
2665 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
2667 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
2668 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
2671 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
2672 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
2673 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
2674 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
2675 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
2676 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
2677 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
2678 of inferior systems.
2680 * Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
2682 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
2683 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
2684 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
2685 that wants to use flow control.
2687 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
2688 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
2689 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
2691 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
2692 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
2693 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
2695 * Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
2697 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
2698 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
2699 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
2700 control on the local system.
2702 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
2703 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
2704 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
2705 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
2707 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
2708 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
2709 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
2711 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
2712 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
2713 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
2714 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
2716 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
2718 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
2721 * Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
2723 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
2724 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
2725 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
2727 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
2728 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
2729 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
2730 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
2731 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
2732 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
2733 There are several possibilities:
2735 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
2737 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
2738 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
2740 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
2741 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
2744 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
2745 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
2746 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
2747 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
2748 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
2749 tested on many kinds of terminals.
2751 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
2753 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
2754 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
2755 for certain terminals.
2757 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
2758 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
2760 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
2761 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
2763 * Output from Control-V is slow.
2765 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
2766 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
2767 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
2768 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
2769 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
2770 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
2772 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
2773 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
2774 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
2775 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
2776 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
2777 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
2778 time as the operations really take.
2780 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
2781 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
2782 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
2783 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
2784 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
2785 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
2786 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
2787 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
2788 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
2789 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
2791 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
2792 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
2793 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
2794 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
2795 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
2796 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
2799 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
2800 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
2801 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
2803 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
2804 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
2806 * Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
2808 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
2810 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
2811 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
2813 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
2815 * You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
2817 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
2820 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
2821 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
2822 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
2823 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
2824 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
2827 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
2828 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
2829 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
2830 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
2831 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
2832 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
2834 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
2835 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
2836 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
2837 You can probably access help-command via f1.
2839 * Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
2840 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
2841 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
2844 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
2845 call in the RFS server.
2847 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
2848 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
2849 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
2850 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
2852 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
2854 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
2855 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
2856 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
2857 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
2858 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
2859 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
2860 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
2862 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
2864 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
2865 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
2866 retrieving revision 1.2
2867 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
2868 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
2869 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
2873 * No return sent for close or fsync!
2875 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
2876 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
2881 * No return sent for close or fsync!
2883 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
2884 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
2888 * Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
2890 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
2892 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
2893 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
2895 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
2896 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
2897 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
2898 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
2899 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
2900 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
2901 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
2903 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
2904 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
2905 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
2906 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
2907 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
2910 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
2911 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
2916 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
2917 causes the problem to go away.
2918 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
2919 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
2921 * 68000 C compiler problems
2923 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
2924 These are some that have been observed.
2926 ** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
2927 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
2928 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
2930 ** "cannot reclaim" error.
2932 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
2933 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
2934 simpler expressions.
2936 ** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
2938 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
2939 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
2941 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
2946 test ((int *) arg.y);
2949 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
2950 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
2951 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
2953 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
2954 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
2956 * C compilers lose on returning unions
2958 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
2959 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
2960 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
2962 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
2963 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.