(xg_frame_resized): Remove check if rows/columns have
[bpt/emacs.git] / etc / PROBLEMS
1 Known Problems with GNU Emacs
2
3 Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
4 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
5 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
6 See the end of the file for license conditions.
7
8
9 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
10 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
11 and browsing through the outline headers.
12
13 * Mule-UCS doesn't work in Emacs 23.
14
15 It's completely redundant now, as far as we know.
16
17 * Emacs startup failures
18
19 ** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
20
21 A typical error message might be something like
22
23 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
24
25 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
26 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
27 are:
28
29 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
30
31 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
32 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
33 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
34
35 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
36 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
37 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
38
39 ** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
40
41 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
42 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
43 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
44 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
45 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
46 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
47 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
48 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
49 not to work.
50
51 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
52 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
53 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
54 same directory where system header files are kept.
55
56 ** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
57
58 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
59 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
60 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
61 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
62 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
63 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
64
65 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
66 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
67 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
68 it constitutes a separate package.
69
70 ** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
71
72 The typical error message might be like this:
73
74 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
75
76 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
77 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
78 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
79 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
80 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
81 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
82 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
83
84 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
85 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
86
87 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
88 file.
89
90 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
91 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
92 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
93
94 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
95
96 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
97 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
98 load-path.
99
100 ** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
101
102 An example of such an error is:
103
104 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
105
106 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
107 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
108 present in load-path:
109
110 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
111
112 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
113 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
114 load-path.
115
116 ** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
117
118 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
119
120 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
121 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
122 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
123 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
124 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
125 /******************************************************************
126
127 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
128 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
129 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
130 XLCd lcd;
131 {
132 - char* begin;
133 - char* end;
134 + char* begin = NULL;
135 + char* end = NULL;
136 char* ret;
137 int i = 0;
138 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
139 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
140 }
141 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
142 if (ret != NULL) {
143 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
144 + if (begin != NULL) {
145 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
146 + } else {
147 + ret[0] = '\0';
148 + }
149 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
150 }
151 return ret;
152
153 ** Emacs crashes on startup after a glibc upgrade.
154
155 This is caused by a binary incompatible change to the malloc
156 implementation in glibc 2.5.90-22. As a result, Emacs binaries built
157 using prior versions of glibc crash when run under 2.5.90-22.
158
159 This problem was first seen in pre-release versions of Fedora 7, and
160 may be fixed in the final Fedora 7 release. To stop the crash from
161 happening, first try upgrading to the newest version of glibc; if this
162 does not work, rebuild Emacs with the same version of glibc that you
163 will run it under. For details, see
164
165 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=239344
166
167 * Crash bugs
168
169 ** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
170
171 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
172 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
173 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
174 happens to exist on your X server).
175
176 ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
177
178 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
179 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
180 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
181
182 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
183 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
184
185 ** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
186 a segmentation fault and core dump.
187
188 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
189 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
190
191 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
192
193 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
194 untar it :-).
195
196 ** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
197 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
198 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
199 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
200 older version.
201
202 ** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
203
204 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
205 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
206 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
207 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
208 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
209
210 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
211 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
212 terminfo when built.
213
214 ** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
215
216 If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
217 reported to prevent the crashes.
218
219 ** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
220
221 It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
222
223 This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
224 the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
225 flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
226 necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
227
228 On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
229 configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
230
231 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes when closing a display (x-close-connection).
232
233 This happens because of bugs in Gtk+. Gtk+ 2.10 seems to be OK. See bug
234 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
235
236 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes on startup on Cygwin.
237
238 A typical error message is
239 ***MEMORY-ERROR***: emacs[5172]: GSlice: failed to allocate 504 bytes
240 (alignment: 512): Function not implemented
241
242 Emacs supplies its own malloc, but glib (part of Gtk+) calls memalign and on
243 Cygwin, that becomes the Cygwin supplied memalign. As malloc is not the
244 Cygwin malloc, the Cygwin memalign always returns ENOSYS. A fix for this
245 problem would be welcome.
246
247 * General runtime problems
248
249 ** Lisp problems
250
251 *** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
252
253 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
254 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
255 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
256 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
257
258 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
259 than the corresponding .el file.
260
261 *** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
262
263 These control the actions of Emacs.
264 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
265 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
266 "load" will search.
267
268 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
269 of them, then try again.
270
271 *** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
272
273 The error message might be something like this:
274
275 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
276
277 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
278 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
279 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
280 corrects that.
281
282 *** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
283
284 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
285 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
286 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
287
288 *** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
289 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
290 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
291 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
292
293 ** Keyboard problems
294
295 *** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
296
297 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
298 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
299 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
300 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
301 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
302 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
303
304 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
305 them to two different keys.
306
307 *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
308
309 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
310 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
311 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
312
313 *** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
314 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
315
316 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
317 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
318 another escape character in kermit. One user did
319
320 set escape-character 17
321
322 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
323
324 ** Mailers and other helper programs
325
326 *** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
327
328 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
329 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
330 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
331 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
332 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
333 old POP protocol.
334
335 *** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
336
337 RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
338 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
339 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
340
341 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
342 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
343 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
344 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
345 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
346 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
347 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
348
349 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
350 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
351 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
352 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
353 make install.
354
355 chgrp mail movemail
356 chmod 2755 movemail
357
358 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
359 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
360 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
361 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
362 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
363 directory copy is ineffective.
364
365 *** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
366
367 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
368 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
369
370 ** Problems with hostname resolution
371
372 *** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
373 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
374 *** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
375 *** Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
376
377 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
378 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
379 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
380 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
381
382 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
383 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
384
385 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
386 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
387
388 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
389 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
390 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
391 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
392 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
393 be careful not to lose the others.
394
395 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
396
397 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
398
399 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
400 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
401 again to say this:
402
403 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
404
405 *** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
406
407 For example, (system-name) returns some variation on
408 "localhost.localdomain", rather the name you were expecting.
409
410 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
411 (i.e. a name with at least one ".") either in /etc/hosts,
412 /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system calls for specifying
413 this.
414
415 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
416 mail-host-address to the value you want.
417
418 ** NFS and RFS
419
420 *** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
421 appear on disk.
422
423 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
424 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
425 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
426 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
427 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
428 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
429
430 *** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
431 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
432 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
433 causes it.
434
435 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
436 call in the RFS server.
437
438 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
439 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
440 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
441 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
442
443 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
444
445 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
446 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
447 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
448 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
449 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
450 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
451 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
452
453 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
454
455 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
456 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
457 retrieving revision 1.2
458 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
459 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
460 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
461 ***************
462 *** 163,169 ****
463 /*
464 * No return sent for close or fsync!
465 */
466 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
467 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
468 else
469 {
470 --- 166,172 ----
471 /*
472 * No return sent for close or fsync!
473 */
474 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
475 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
476 else
477 {
478
479 ** PSGML
480
481 *** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
482 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
483 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
484
485 *** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
486
487 PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
488 as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
489 of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
490 sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
491 HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
492 (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
493 (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
494
495 *** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
496 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
497 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
498 earlier versions.
499
500 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
501 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
502 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
503 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
504 (cond
505 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
506 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
507 + (insert-file-contents entity)
508 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
509 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
510 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
511
512 ** AUCTeX
513
514 You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
515 it.
516
517 *** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
518
519 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
520 these problems.
521
522 *** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
523
524 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
525 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
526
527 ** PCL-CVS
528
529 *** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit.
530
531 When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examined
532 directory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous message
533 from which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committed
534 files. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer are
535 not updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines are
536 added to the top-level directory.
537
538 This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS
539 1.12.10 or newer to fix this problem.
540
541 ** Miscellaneous problems
542
543 *** Emacs uses 100% of CPU time
544
545 This is a known problem with some versions of the Semantic package.
546 The solution is to upgrade Semantic to version 2.0pre4 (distributed
547 with CEDET 1.0pre4) or later.
548
549 *** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
550
551 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
552 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
553 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
554
555 *** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
556 terminal type.
557
558 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
559 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
560 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
561 emulates.
562
563 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
564 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
565 it only if it is undefined.
566
567 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
568
569 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
570 happen in a non-login shell.
571
572 *** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
573
574 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
575 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
576 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
577 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
578
579 if ($?EMACS) then
580 if ("$EMACS" =~ /*) then
581 unset edit
582 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
583 endif
584 endif
585
586 *** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
587
588 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
589 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
590 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
591
592 127.0.0.1 localhost
593 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
594
595 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
596
597 *** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
598
599 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
600 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
601 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
602 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
603 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
604 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
605
606 update-alternatives --config ftp
607
608 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
609
610 *** JPEG images aren't displayed.
611
612 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
613 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
614 correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
615 against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
616
617 *** Dired is very slow.
618
619 This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
620 time. Possible reasons for this include:
621
622 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
623 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
624
625 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
626
627 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
628
629 To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
630 `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
631 invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
632 (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
633
634 *** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
635 under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
636
637 *** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
638
639 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
640 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
641 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
642 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
643
644 *** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
645
646 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
647 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
648 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
649
650 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
651
652 *** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
653 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
654 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
655 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
656 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
657
658 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
659 process invokes Emacs several times.
660
661 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
662 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
663 can be found.
664
665 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
666 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
667 specified run-time search path in the executable.
668
669 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
670 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
671 backtraces like this:
672
673 (dbx) where
674 0 strcmp(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) ["/xlv22/ficus-jan23/work/irix/lib/libc/libc_n32_M3_ns/strings/strcmp.s":35, 0xfb7e480]
675 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
676 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
677 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
678 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
679 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
680 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
681 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
682 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
683
684 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
685 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
686 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
687 to work around the problem.
688
689 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
690
691 *** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
692 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
693
694 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
695 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
696 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
697
698 *** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
699
700 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
701 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
702 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
703 support for 8-bit characters.
704
705 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
706 this at your shell's prompt:
707
708 ispell -vv
709
710 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
711 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
712 does not.
713
714 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
715 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
716 Then rebuild the speller.
717
718 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
719 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
720
721 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
722 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
723 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
724 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
725 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
726
727 If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
728 you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
729 can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
730 in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
731
732 * Runtime problems related to font handling
733
734 ** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
735
736 *** This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
737 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
738 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with Gtk+ will then use the
739 newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily fixed by
740 stopping the application that has the error (it can be Emacs or any
741 other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1, and then start the
742 application again. If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting
743 doesn't help, the application with problem must be recompiled with the
744 same version of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE,
745 it is sufficient to recompile Qt.
746
747 *** Some fonts have a missing glyph and no default character. This is
748 known to occur for character number 160 (no-break space) in some
749 fonts, such as Lucida but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte
750 and Latin-1 version of this character to display a space.
751
752 *** Some of the fonts called for in your fontset may not exist on your
753 X server.
754
755 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
756 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
757 many different fonts, collected into a fontset. You can remedy the
758 problem by installing additional fonts.
759
760 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
761 display all the characters Emacs supports. The etl-unicode collection
762 of fonts (available from <URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/fonts/> and
763 <URL:ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/mirror/X.Org/contrib/fonts/>) includes
764 fonts that can display many Unicode characters; they can also be used
765 by ps-print and ps-mule to print Unicode characters.
766
767 ** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
768
769 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution
770 or the etl-unicode collection (see above).
771
772 ** Under X, an unexpected monospace font is used as the default font.
773
774 When compiled with XFT, Emacs tries to use a default font named
775 "monospace". This is a "virtual font", which the operating system
776 (Fontconfig) redirects to a suitable font such as DejaVu Sans Mono.
777 On some systems, there exists a font that is actually named Monospace,
778 which takes over the virtual font. This is considered an operating
779 system bug; see
780
781 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-10/msg00696.html
782
783 If you encounter this problem, set the default font to a specific font
784 in your .Xresources or initialization file. For instance, you can put
785 the following in your .Xresources:
786
787 Emacs.font: DejaVu Sans Mono 12
788
789 ** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it should.
790
791 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller than
792 the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that lines do not
793 overlap.
794
795 ** Loading fonts is very slow.
796
797 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
798 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
799 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
800 "fonts.scale".
801
802 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
803 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
804
805 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
806 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
807 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
808
809 ** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
810
811 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
812 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
813 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
814 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
815 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
816 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
817 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
818 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
819 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
820 to the end of a very large buffer.
821
822 Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
823 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
824 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
825 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
826
827 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
828 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
829 fontification by setting the variable
830 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
831 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
832
833 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
834 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
835
836 ** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
837 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
838
839 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
840 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
841 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
842
843 ** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
844
845 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
846 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
847 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
848 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
849
850 A workaround for this is to add something like
851
852 emacs.waitForWM: false
853
854 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
855 frame's parameter list, like this:
856
857 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
858
859 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
860
861 ** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
862
863 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
864 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
865 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package prior to version 3.0.17.
866 To circumvent this problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties
867 to nil in your `.emacs'.
868
869 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
870 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
871 property.
872
873 ** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
874
875 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
876 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
877 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
878 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
879 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
880
881 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
882 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
883
884 ** Subscript/superscript text in TeX is hard to read.
885
886 If `tex-fontify-script' is non-nil, tex-mode displays
887 subscript/superscript text in the faces subscript/superscript, which
888 are smaller than the normal font and lowered/raised. With some fonts,
889 nested superscripts (say) can be hard to read. Switching to a
890 different font, or changing your antialiasing setting (on an LCD
891 screen), can both make the problem disappear. Alternatively, customize
892 the following variables: tex-font-script-display (how much to
893 lower/raise); tex-suscript-height-ratio (how much smaller than
894 normal); tex-suscript-height-minimum (minimum height).
895
896 * Internationalization problems
897
898 ** M-{ does not work on a Spanish PC keyboard.
899
900 Many Spanish keyboards seem to ignore that combination. Emacs can't
901 do anything about it.
902
903 ** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
904
905 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
906 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
907 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
908 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
909 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
910 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
911 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
912 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
913 include in the fontset spec:
914
915 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
916 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
917 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
918
919 ** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
920
921 Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in the
922 ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts of
923 CJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets:
924
925 GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601
926
927 The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on by
928 default). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacs
929 charset is decided by the current language environment. For instance,
930 in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312.
931
932 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
933 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
934 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
935 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
936 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
937 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
938 information.
939
940 ** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
941
942 Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
943 library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
944 following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
945 though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
946 distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
947
948 --- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
949 +++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
950 @@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
951
952 (mapcar
953 (lambda (x)
954 - (mapcar
955 - (lambda (y)
956 - (mucs-define-coding-system
957 - (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
958 - (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
959 - (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
960 - (cdr x)))
961 + (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
962 + ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
963 + ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
964 + ;; system definitions.
965 + (let ((y (cadr x)))
966 + (mucs-define-coding-system
967 + (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
968 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
969 + (mapcar
970 + (lambda (y)
971 + (mucs-define-coding-system
972 + (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
973 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
974 + (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
975 + (cdr x)))
976 `((utf-8
977 (utf-8-unix
978 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
979
980 Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
981 Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
982
983 ** Mule-UCS compilation problem.
984
985 Emacs of old versions and XEmacs byte-compile the form `(progn progn
986 ...)' the same way as `(progn ...)', but Emacs of version 21.3 and the
987 later process that form just as interpreter does, that is, as `progn'
988 variable reference. Apply the following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 to
989 make it compiled by the latest Emacs.
990
991 --- mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 00:42:23 -0000 1.1.1.1
992 +++ mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 01:31:51 -0000 1.3
993 @@ -639,10 +639,14 @@
994 (mucs-notify-embedment 'mucs-ccl-required name)
995 (setq ccl-pgm-list (cdr ccl-pgm-list)))
996 ; (message "MCCLREGFIN:%S" result)
997 - `(progn
998 - (setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
999 - (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
1000 - ,@result)))
1001 + ;; The only way the function is used in this package is included
1002 + ;; in `mucs-package-definition-end-hook' value, where it must
1003 + ;; return (possibly empty) *list* of forms. Do this. Do not rely
1004 + ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)'
1005 + ;; form.
1006 + `((setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
1007 + (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
1008 + ,@result)))
1009
1010 ;;; Add hook for embedding translation informations to a package.
1011 (add-hook 'mucs-package-definition-end-hook
1012
1013 ** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
1014
1015 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
1016 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
1017 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
1018 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
1019 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
1020 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
1021
1022 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
1023
1024 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
1025
1026 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
1027 problem.
1028
1029 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
1030 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
1031 `xset fp rehash'.
1032
1033 ** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
1034
1035 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
1036 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
1037 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
1038 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
1039 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
1040
1041 ** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1042
1043 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1044 (standard-display-european t)
1045 That should be changed to
1046 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1047
1048 * X runtime problems
1049
1050 ** X keyboard problems
1051
1052 *** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
1053
1054 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
1055 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
1056 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
1057 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
1058
1059 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
1060
1061 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
1062
1063 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
1064 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
1065 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
1066
1067 *** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
1068
1069 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
1070
1071 *** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method).
1072
1073 Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program
1074 which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users
1075 from using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'.
1076
1077 One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' file
1078 which can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory.
1079 However, that requires root access.
1080
1081 Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources.
1082
1083 Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.
1084
1085 The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx
1086 (Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. If
1087 you want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitx
1088 by another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or be
1089 accustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'.
1090
1091 *** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1092
1093 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1094 for character composition.
1095
1096 *** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1097
1098 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1099 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1100 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1101 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1102 purposes.
1103
1104 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1105 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1106
1107 *** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1108
1109 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1110 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1111 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1112 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1113 change this.
1114
1115 *** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
1116
1117 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
1118 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
1119 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
1120
1121 *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
1122 directly with an X server.
1123
1124 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
1125 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
1126 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
1127 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
1128 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
1129 have made the key binding correctly.
1130
1131 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
1132 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
1133 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
1134 default.
1135
1136 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
1137
1138 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
1139 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
1140
1141 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1142 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1143 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1144 modifier bit not otherwise used.
1145
1146 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1147 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1148 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1149 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
1150
1151 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1152 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
1153
1154 ** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
1155
1156 *** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM.
1157
1158 This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later
1159 is running. If gnome-settings-daemon is not running, Emacs receives
1160 input through XIM without any problem. Furthermore, this seems only
1161 to happen in *.UTF-8 locales; zh_CN.GB2312 and zh_CN.GBK locales, for
1162 example, work fine. A bug report has been filed in the Gnome
1163 bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357032
1164
1165 *** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
1166
1167 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1168 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1169 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1170 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1171 been filed.
1172
1173 *** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1174 or messed up.
1175
1176 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1177 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1178 background.
1179
1180 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1181 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1182 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1183 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1184 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1185
1186 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1187 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1188 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1189 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1190 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1191 present or commented out:
1192
1193 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1194 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1195 Emacs*Foreground
1196 Emacs*Background
1197
1198 It is also reported that a bug in the gtk-engines-qt engine can cause this if
1199 Emacs is compiled with Gtk+.
1200 The bug is fixed in version 0.7 or newer of gtk-engines-qt.
1201
1202 *** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1203
1204 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1205 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1206 of klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections,
1207 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1208 while, Emacs may print a message:
1209
1210 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1211
1212 A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
1213 comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
1214
1215 *** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1216
1217 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1218 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1219 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1220 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1221
1222 *** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1223 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1224 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1225 problem disappears.
1226
1227 *** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1228 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1229 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1230 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1231 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1232 used with neXtaw at run time.
1233
1234 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1235 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1236 built Emacs with.
1237
1238 *** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
1239
1240 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1241 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1242 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1243 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
1244
1245 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1246 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
1247
1248 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1249 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1250 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
1251
1252 *** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
1253
1254 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1255 emulation for which it is set up.
1256
1257 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
1258 LessTif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
1259 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1260 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1261 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1262 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1263 menu placement.
1264
1265 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1266 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1267 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1268 developers.
1269
1270 *** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1271
1272 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1273
1274 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1275
1276 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1277 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1278 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1279 the resource prevents the problem.
1280
1281 ** General X problems
1282
1283 *** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1284
1285 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1286 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1287 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1288 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1289
1290 Here's how to do this:
1291
1292 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1293
1294 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1295 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1296 to normal, do
1297
1298 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1299
1300 *** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
1301
1302 The messages might say something like this:
1303
1304 Unable to load color "grey95"
1305
1306 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
1307
1308 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
1309
1310 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1311 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1312 resources to load all the colors it needs.
1313
1314 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
1315
1316 "undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the
1317 X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where
1318 X expects to find it.
1319
1320 *** Improving performance with slow X connections.
1321
1322 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1323 be carried out at the same time:
1324
1325 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1326 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1327 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1328 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1329 package.
1330
1331 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
1332 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the
1333 following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only
1334 after the the initial frame is displayed:
1335
1336 (scroll-bar-mode -1)
1337 (menu-bar-mode -1)
1338 (tool-bar-mode -1)
1339
1340 For still quicker startup, put these X resources in your .Xdefaults
1341 file:
1342
1343 Emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
1344 Emacs.menuBar: off
1345 Emacs.toolBar: off
1346
1347 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1348 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
1349
1350 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1351 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1352 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1353 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1354 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
1355 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a separate
1356 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1357 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1358 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1359 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1360 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
1361
1362 5) If copying and killing is slow, try to disable the interaction with the
1363 native system's clipboard by adding these lines to your .emacs file:
1364 (setq interprogram-cut-function nil)
1365 (setq interprogram-paste-function nil)
1366
1367 *** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1368
1369 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1370 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1371 likely to cause it.
1372
1373 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1374
1375 *** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1376
1377 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1378 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1379
1380 *** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
1381
1382 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1383 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1384 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1385 the Files menu).
1386
1387 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1388 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1389 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1390 workaround can be found.
1391
1392 *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1393 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
1394
1395 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1396 emacs*Cursor: black
1397 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1398 that isn't a color.)
1399
1400 The fix is to correct your X resources.
1401
1402 *** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
1403
1404 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1405 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1406 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1407 font.
1408
1409 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1410 your font path, like this:
1411
1412 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
1413
1414 *** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
1415
1416 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
1417
1418 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
1419
1420 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1421 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1422 want, rewrite the resource.
1423
1424 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1425 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1426 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
1427
1428 *** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1429 *** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
1430
1431 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1432 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1433 the environment.
1434
1435 *** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
1436
1437 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1438 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1439 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
1440
1441 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1442 whether this problem is present on a given system.
1443
1444 *** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
1445
1446 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1447 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1448 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1449 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
1450
1451 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1452 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1453 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
1454
1455 The easy way to do this is to put
1456
1457 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
1458
1459 in your site-init.el file.
1460
1461 *** Prevent double pastes in X
1462
1463 The problem: a region, such as a command, is pasted twice when you copy
1464 it with your mouse from GNU Emacs to an xterm or an RXVT shell in X.
1465 The solution: try the following in your X configuration file,
1466 /etc/X11/xorg.conf This should enable both PS/2 and USB mice for
1467 single copies. You do not need any other drivers or options.
1468
1469 Section "InputDevice"
1470 Identifier "Generic Mouse"
1471 Driver "mousedev"
1472 Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
1473 EndSection
1474
1475 * Runtime problems on character terminals
1476
1477 ** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
1478
1479 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1480 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1481 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1482 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1483 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1484 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1485 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1486 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
1487
1488 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
1489
1490 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1491 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1492 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
1493
1494 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1495 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1496 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
1497 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1498 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1499 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
1500
1501 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1502 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1503 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1504 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1505 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1506 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1507 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1508 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1509 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
1510
1511 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1512 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1513 codes. You might as well try it.
1514
1515 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1516 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1517 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1518 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1519 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1520 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1521 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1522 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
1523
1524 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1525 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1526 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1527 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1528 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1529 control handling.)
1530
1531 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1532 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1533 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1534 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1535 other control characters are already used by emacs.
1536
1537 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1538 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1539 order to continue.
1540
1541 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1542 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1543 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1544 automatically. Here is an example:
1545
1546 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1547
1548 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1549 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1550 manually.
1551
1552 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1553 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1554 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1555 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1556 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1557 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1558 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1559 of inferior systems.
1560
1561 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
1562
1563 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1564 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1565 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1566 that wants to use flow control.
1567
1568 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1569 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1570 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
1571
1572 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1573 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1574 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
1575
1576 ** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
1577
1578 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1579 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1580 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
1581
1582 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1583 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1584 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1585 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1586 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1587 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1588 There are several possibilities:
1589
1590 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
1591
1592 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1593 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
1594
1595 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1596 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1597 by termcap.
1598
1599 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1600 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1601 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1602 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1603 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1604 tested on many kinds of terminals.
1605
1606 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
1607
1608 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1609 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1610 for certain terminals.
1611
1612 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1613 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
1614
1615 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1616 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
1617
1618 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
1619
1620 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1621 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1622 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1623 control on the local system.
1624
1625 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1626 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1627 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1628 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
1629
1630 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1631 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1632 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
1633
1634 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1635 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1636 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1637 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
1638
1639 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1640
1641 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1642 info.
1643
1644 ** Output from Control-V is slow.
1645
1646 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1647 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1648 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1649 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1650 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1651 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
1652
1653 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1654 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1655 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1656 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1657 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1658 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1659 time as the operations really take.
1660
1661 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1662 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1663 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1664 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1665 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1666 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1667 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1668 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1669 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1670 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
1671
1672 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1673 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1674 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1675 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1676 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1677 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1678 `cm' string.
1679
1680 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1681 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1682 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
1683
1684 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1685 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
1686
1687 ** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
1688
1689 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1690 after a day or two.
1691
1692 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1693 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1694 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1695 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1696 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1697 to it.
1698
1699 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1700 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1701 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1702 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1703 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1704 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
1705
1706 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1707 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1708 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1709 You can probably access help-command via f1.
1710
1711 ** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
1712
1713 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1714 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1715 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1716 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1717 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1718 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1719 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1720 "colors".
1721
1722 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1723 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1724 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1725 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1726 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1727 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1728 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1729 capability).
1730
1731 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1732 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1733 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1734 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
1735
1736 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1737 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1738 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1739 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1740 emulator.
1741
1742 Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line
1743 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1744 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1745 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
1746
1747 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1748 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1749 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1750 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1751 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1752 `global-font-lock-mode'.
1753
1754 * Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
1755
1756 ** GNU/Linux
1757
1758 *** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted.
1759
1760 There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs to
1761 read corrupted process output.
1762
1763 *** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption.
1764
1765 If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupted
1766 due to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc.
1767
1768 To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it
1769 executable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name of
1770 the script:
1771
1772 #!/bin/bash
1773 exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
1774 exec ssh "$@"
1775
1776 *** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1777 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1778
1779 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1780 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1781 known to work.
1782
1783 *** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1784 the Meta key stops working.
1785
1786 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1787 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1788 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1789 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1790 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1791 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1792 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1793
1794 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1795 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1796 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1797 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1798 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1799 modifier:
1800
1801 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1802
1803 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1804 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1805
1806 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1807
1808 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1809 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1810 keys can serve as Meta.
1811
1812 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1813 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1814
1815 *** GNU/Linux: slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1816
1817 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1818 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1819
1820 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1821 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1822 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1823 networked and non-networked machines.
1824
1825 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1826
1827 **** Networked Case.
1828
1829 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1830 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1831 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1832
1833 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
1834
1835 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1836 lines:
1837
1838 order hosts, bind
1839 multi on
1840
1841 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1842 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1843 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1844 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1845
1846 **** Non-Networked Case.
1847
1848 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1849 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1850 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1851 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1852 file is not necessary with this approach.
1853
1854 *** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
1855
1856 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1857 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1858 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1859 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1860 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1861 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1862 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1863 always blinks.
1864
1865 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1866 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1867 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1868 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1869 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1870 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
1871
1872 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1873 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1874 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1875 produce a modified terminfo entry.
1876
1877 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1878 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
1879
1880 *** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1881
1882 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1883 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1884 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1885 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1886
1887 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1888
1889 ** FreeBSD
1890
1891 *** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1892 directories that have the +t bit.
1893
1894 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1895 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1896 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1897 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1898
1899 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1900 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1901
1902 *** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
1903
1904 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1905 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1906 current keymap to a file with the command
1907
1908 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
1909
1910 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1911 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1912 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1913 to look like this
1914
1915 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
1916
1917 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
1918
1919 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
1920
1921 ** HP-UX
1922
1923 *** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
1924
1925 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
1926
1927 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1928 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1929 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1930 but tty is giving it back 3.
1931
1932 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1933 word:
1934
1935 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
1936
1937 should be changed to:
1938
1939 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
1940
1941 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1942 and into .login.
1943
1944 *** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
1945
1946 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1947 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1948 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1949 value is just ten seconds.
1950
1951 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
1952
1953 *** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1954 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1955
1956 This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1957 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1958 configures the X server.
1959
1960 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1961 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1962 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1963 EOF
1964
1965 xmodmap - << EOF
1966 clear mod1
1967 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1968 add mod1 = Meta_L
1969 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1970 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1971 EOF
1972
1973 *** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1974 Emacs built with Motif.
1975
1976 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1977 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1978
1979 *** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
1980
1981 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1982 rights, containing this text:
1983
1984 --------------------------------
1985 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1986 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1987 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1988 EOF
1989
1990 xmodmap - << EOF
1991 clear mod1
1992 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1993 add mod1 = Meta_L
1994 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1995 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1996 EOF
1997 --------------------------------
1998
1999 *** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
2000
2001 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
2002
2003 ** AIX
2004
2005 *** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
2006
2007 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2008 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2009
2010 *** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
2011
2012 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
2013
2014 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
2015 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
2016
2017 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
2018
2019 *** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
2020 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
2021 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
2022 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
2023
2024 *** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
2025
2026 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
2027 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
2028 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
2029 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
2030
2031 *** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
2032 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
2033
2034 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
2035 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
2036 Definitions" to make them defined.
2037
2038 ** Solaris
2039
2040 We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
2041 section on legacy systems.
2042
2043 *** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2044
2045 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2046 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2047
2048 *** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2049
2050 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2051 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2052 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2053 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2054
2055 *** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
2056
2057 We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
2058 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
2059 makes the problem stop:
2060
2061 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
2062 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
2063 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
2064 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
2065
2066 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
2067 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
2068
2069 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
2070 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
2071 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
2072
2073 *** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
2074
2075 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
2076 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
2077
2078 *** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
2079 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
2080
2081 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
2082
2083 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
2084
2085 *** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
2086 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
2087
2088 You can fix this by editing the file:
2089
2090 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
2091
2092 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
2093
2094 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2095
2096 that should read:
2097
2098 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2099
2100 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
2101
2102 *** On Solaris, Emacs fails to set menu-bar-update-hook on startup, with error
2103 "Error in menu-bar-update-hook: (error Point before start of properties)".
2104 This seems to be a GCC optimization bug that occurs for GCC 4.1.2 (-g
2105 and -g -O2) and GCC 4.2.3 (-g -O and -g -O2). You can fix this by
2106 compiling with GCC 4.2.3 or CC 5.7, with no optimizations.
2107
2108 ** Irix
2109
2110 *** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
2111
2112 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
2113
2114 *** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
2115
2116 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2117 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2118 to allocate ptys reliably.
2119
2120 * Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
2121
2122 ** Windows 95 and networking.
2123
2124 To support server sockets, Emacs 22.1 loads ws2_32.dll. If this file
2125 is missing, all Emacs networking features are disabled.
2126
2127 Old versions of Windows 95 may not have the required DLL. To use
2128 Emacs' networking features on Windows 95, you must install the
2129 "Windows Socket 2" update available from MicroSoft's support Web.
2130
2131 ** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
2132
2133 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
2134 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
2135 problem.
2136
2137 ** Emacs crashes when opening a file with a UNC path and rails-mode is loaded.
2138
2139 Loading rails-mode seems to interfere with UNC path handling. This has been
2140 reported as a bug against both Emacs and rails-mode, so look for an updated
2141 rails-mode that avoids this crash, or avoid using UNC paths if using
2142 rails-mode.
2143
2144 ** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 22.3
2145
2146 M-x term does not work on MS-Windows. TTY emulation on Windows is
2147 undocumented, and programs such as stty which are used on posix platforms
2148 to control tty emulation do not exist for native windows terminals.
2149
2150 Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameter
2151 with a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems.
2152 Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control over
2153 which font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character,
2154 use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset.
2155
2156 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
2157 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
2158 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
2159 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
2160 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
2161 pop-up menu interaction.
2162
2163 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
2164 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
2165
2166 When "ClearType" method is selected as the "method to smooth edges of
2167 screen fonts" (in Display Properties, Appearance tab, under
2168 "Effects"), there are various problems related to display of
2169 characters: Bold fonts can be hard to read, small portions of some
2170 characters could appear chopped, etc. This happens because, under
2171 ClearType, characters are drawn outside their advertised bounding box.
2172 Emacs 21 disabled the use of ClearType, whereas Emacs 22 allows it and
2173 has some code to enlarge the width of the bounding box. Apparently,
2174 this display feature needs more changes to get it 100% right. A
2175 workaround is to disable ClearType.
2176
2177 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
2178 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
2179 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
2180 after moving back into it.
2181
2182 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
2183 not as severely as in 21.1.
2184
2185 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
2186 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
2187
2188 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. However, some
2189 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
2190 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
2191 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make these
2192 input methods work with Emacs, set the keyboard coding system to the
2193 appropriate value after you activate the Windows input method. For
2194 example, if you activate the Hebrew input method, type this:
2195
2196 C-x RET k hebrew-iso-8bit RET
2197
2198 (Emacs ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up
2199 the appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do
2200 that yet.) In addition, to use these Windows input methods, you
2201 should set your "Language for non-Unicode programs" (on Windows XP,
2202 this is on the Advanced tab of Regional Settings) to the language of
2203 the input method.
2204
2205 To bind keys that produce non-ASCII characters with modifiers, you
2206 must specify raw byte codes. For instance, if you want to bind
2207 META-a-grave to a command, you need to specify this in your `~/.emacs':
2208
2209 (global-set-key [?\M-\340] ...)
2210
2211 The above example is for the Latin-1 environment where the byte code
2212 of the encoded a-grave is 340 octal. For other environments, use the
2213 encoding appropriate to that environment.
2214
2215 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
2216 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
2217 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
2218 library function.
2219
2220 The function set-time-zone-rule gives incorrect results for many
2221 non-US timezones. This is due to over-simplistic handling of
2222 daylight savings switchovers by the Windows libraries.
2223
2224 Files larger than 4GB cause overflow in the size (represented as a
2225 32-bit integer) reported by `file-attributes'. This affects Dired as
2226 well, since the Windows port uses a Lisp emulation of `ls' that relies
2227 on `file-attributes'.
2228
2229 Sound playing is not supported with the `:data DATA' key-value pair.
2230 You _must_ use the `:file FILE' method.
2231
2232 ** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
2233
2234 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
2235 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
2236 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
2237 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
2238 or disable it in the "Regional and Language Options" applet of the
2239 Control Panel. (The exact sequence of mouse clicks in the "Regional
2240 and Language Options" applet needed to find the key combination that
2241 changes the keyboard layout depends on your Windows version; for XP,
2242 in the Languages tab, click "Details" and then "Key Settings".)
2243
2244 ** Cygwin build of Emacs hangs after rebasing Cygwin DLLs
2245
2246 Usually, on Cygwin, one needs to rebase the DLLs if an application
2247 aborts with a message like this:
2248
2249 C:\cygwin\bin\python.exe: *** unable to remap C:\cygwin\bin\cygssl.dll to
2250 same address as parent(0xDF0000) != 0xE00000
2251
2252 However, since Cygwin DLL 1.5.17 was released, after such rebasing,
2253 Emacs hangs.
2254
2255 This was reported to happen for Emacs 21.2 and also for the pretest of
2256 Emacs 22.1 on Cygwin.
2257
2258 To work around this, build Emacs like this:
2259
2260 LDFLAGS='-Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base' ./configure
2261 make LD='$(CC)'
2262 make LD='$(CC)' install
2263
2264 This produces an Emacs binary that is independent of rebasing.
2265
2266 Note that you _must_ use LD='$(CC)' in the last two commands above, to
2267 prevent GCC from passing the "--image-base 0x20000000" option to the
2268 linker, which is what it does by default. That option produces an
2269 Emacs binary with the base address 0x20000000, which will cause Emacs
2270 to hang after Cygwin DLLs are rebased.
2271
2272 ** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
2273
2274 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
2275 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
2276 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
2277 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
2278 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
2279
2280 ** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2281
2282 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
2283 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
2284 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
2285 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
2286 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
2287 confuses ange-ftp.
2288
2289 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2290 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2291 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2292 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2293 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2294 client's executable. For example:
2295
2296 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
2297
2298 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2299 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
2300
2301 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
2302
2303 ** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
2304
2305 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2306 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
2307
2308 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2309 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2310 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2311 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2312 has):
2313
2314 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2315 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2316 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2317 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
2318
2319 ** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2320
2321 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2322 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2323 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2324 work when an antivirus package is installed.
2325
2326 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2327 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2328 or disable it entirely.
2329
2330 ** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
2331
2332 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2333 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2334 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2335 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2336 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2337 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2338 generic mouse driver might help.
2339
2340 ** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
2341
2342 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2343 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2344 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2345 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
2346
2347 ** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2348 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2349 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2350 seen.
2351
2352 ** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2353 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
2354
2355 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
2356
2357 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2358 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2359 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2360 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2361 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2362 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
2363
2364 ** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
2365
2366 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2367 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2368 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2369 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
2370
2371 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2372 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2373 problem lies in the X-server settings.
2374
2375 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2376 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2377 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2378 selection".
2379
2380 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2381 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2382 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2383 here.
2384
2385 * Build-time problems
2386
2387 ** Configuration
2388
2389 *** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
2390
2391 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2392 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2393 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
2394
2395 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2396 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2397 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2398 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2399 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2400 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
2401
2402 *** `configure' warns ``accepted by the compiler, rejected by the preprocessor''.
2403
2404 This indicates a mismatch between the C compiler and preprocessor that
2405 configure is using. For example, on Solaris 10 trying to use
2406 CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc (the Sun Studio compiler) together with
2407 CPP=/usr/ccs/lib/cpp can result in errors of this form (you may also
2408 see the error ``"/usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h", line 500: undefined control'').
2409
2410 The solution is to tell configure to use the correct C preprocessor
2411 for your C compiler (CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E" in the above
2412 example).
2413
2414 *** `configure' fails with ``"junk.c", line 660: invalid input token: 8.elc''
2415
2416 The final stage of the Emacs configure process uses the C preprocessor
2417 to generate the Makefiles. Errors of this form can occur if the C
2418 preprocessor inserts extra whitespace into its output. The solution
2419 is to find the switches that stop your preprocessor from inserting extra
2420 whitespace, add them to CPPFLAGS, and re-run configure. For example,
2421 this error can occur on Solaris 10 when using the Sun Studio compiler
2422 ``Sun C 5.8'' with its preprocessor CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E".
2423 The relevant switch in this case is "-Xs" (``compile assuming
2424 (pre-ANSI) K & R C style code'').
2425
2426 ** Compilation
2427
2428 *** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
2429
2430 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
2431 (Red Hat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
2432 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2433 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2434 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2435 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2436 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2437 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
2438
2439 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2440 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2441 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2442 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
2443
2444 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2445 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2446 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2447 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2448 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2449 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2450 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2451 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2452 `/etc/auto.home'.
2453
2454 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2455 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2456 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2457 to work around the problem.
2458
2459 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2460 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2461 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2462 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
2463
2464 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
2465
2466 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
2467
2468 *** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
2469
2470 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2471 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2472 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2473 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2474 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2475 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2476 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2477 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2478 variables).
2479
2480 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2481 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2482 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2483 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2484 run the script like this:
2485
2486 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
2487
2488 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2489 the script).
2490
2491 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2492 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
2493
2494 *** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2495 *** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2496
2497 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2498 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2499 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2500 configure script.
2501
2502 *** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2503
2504 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2505 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2506 Emacs's configure script.
2507
2508 *** Building a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit GNU/Linux architecture.
2509
2510 First ensure that the necessary 32-bit system libraries and include
2511 files are installed. Then use:
2512
2513 env CC="gcc -m32" ./configure --build=i386-linux-gnu \
2514 --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
2515
2516 (using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system).
2517
2518 *** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC versions
2519
2520 Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
2521 reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time. In
2522 addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
2523 info. Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
2524 compiling Emacs. GCC versions 4.0.3, 4.0.4, 4.1.1, and 4.1.2
2525 reportedly build a working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend
2526 these GCC versions. Note that these versions of GCC, 4.0.3, 4.0.4,
2527 4.1.1, and 4.1.2, are currently the _only_ versions known to succeed
2528 in building Emacs (as of v22.1).
2529
2530 *** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
2531
2532 Emacs may not build using some Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2533 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2534 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2535 __MSVCRT__, like so:
2536
2537 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
2538
2539 *** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
2540
2541 Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2542 to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2543 fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
2544
2545 *** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
2546
2547 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2548 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2549 patch to assert.h should solve this:
2550
2551 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2552 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2553 ***************
2554 *** 41,47 ****
2555 /*
2556 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2557 */
2558 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
2559
2560 #else /* debugging enabled */
2561
2562 --- 41,47 ----
2563 /*
2564 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2565 */
2566 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
2567
2568 #else /* debugging enabled */
2569
2570
2571 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Visual Studio 2005 fails.
2572
2573 Microsoft no longer ships the single threaded version of the C library
2574 with their compiler, and the multithreaded static library is missing
2575 some functions that Microsoft have deemed non-threadsafe. The
2576 dynamically linked C library has all the functions, but there is a
2577 conflict between the versions of malloc in the DLL and in Emacs, which
2578 is not resolvable due to the way Windows does dynamic linking.
2579
2580 We recommend the use of the MingW port of GCC for compiling Emacs, as
2581 not only does it not suffer these problems, but it is also Free
2582 software like Emacs.
2583
2584 ** Linking
2585
2586 *** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2587 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
2588
2589 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2590 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2591 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2592 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2593 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2594 link stage.
2595
2596 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
2597
2598 make CC=gcc
2599
2600 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2601 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
2602
2603 *** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
2604
2605 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2606 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2607 workaround/fix is:
2608
2609 cd /lib
2610 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2611 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2612
2613 *** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2614 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2615 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2616
2617 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2618 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2619 you build Emacs:
2620
2621 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2622 chmod 664 libIM.a
2623 ranlib libIM.a
2624
2625 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2626 Makefile).
2627
2628 *** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2629
2630 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2631
2632 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2633
2634 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2635
2636 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2637 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2638
2639 *** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2640
2641 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2642
2643 *** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
2644
2645 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2646 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2647 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2648 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2649 does not work with this version of ncurses.
2650
2651 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
2652
2653 ** Bootstrapping
2654
2655 Bootstrapping (compiling the .el files) is normally only necessary
2656 with CVS builds, since they the .elc files are pre-compiled in releases.
2657
2658 *** "No rule to make target" with Ubuntu 8.04 make 3.81-3build1
2659
2660 Compiling the lisp files fails at random places, complaining:
2661 "No rule to make target `/path/to/some/lisp.elc'".
2662 The causes of this problem are not understood. Using GNU make 3.81 compiled
2663 from source, rather than the Ubuntu version, worked. See Bug#327,821.
2664
2665 ** Dumping
2666
2667 *** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
2668
2669 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Red Hat Fedora Core
2670 1 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
2671 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs tries
2672 to handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, these
2673 instructions can be useful.
2674 The work-around explained here is not enough on Fedora Core 4 (and possible
2675 newer). Read the next item.
2676
2677 Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
2678 x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
2679 workaround is known.
2680
2681 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
2682
2683 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2684
2685 It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
2686 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
2687 associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
2688
2689 echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2690
2691 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2692 execution of this command:
2693
2694 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2695
2696 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
2697 Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
2698 command when running temacs like this:
2699
2700 setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2701
2702
2703 *** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.
2704
2705 In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during
2706 `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel"
2707 item, Linux kernel shipped with Fedora Core 4 randomizes the virtual
2708 address space of a process. As the result dumping may fail even if
2709 you turn off exec-shield. In this case, use the -R option to the setarch
2710 command:
2711
2712 setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2713
2714 or
2715
2716 setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
2717
2718 *** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
2719
2720 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2721 Makefile in the src subdirectory.
2722
2723 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2724 space available on the machine.
2725
2726 On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2727 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2728 for large blocks (many pages).
2729
2730 *** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2731 *** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2732 *** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2733 *** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
2734
2735 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2736 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2737 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2738
2739 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2740 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2741 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2742 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2743 when unpacking the shell archive.
2744
2745 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2746 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2747 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2748
2749 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2750 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2751
2752 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2753 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2754 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2755 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2756 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2757 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2758 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2759 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2760 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2761 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2762 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2763 and remake temacs.
2764 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2765
2766 *** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
2767
2768 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2769 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2770 space than was allocated.
2771
2772 This could be caused by
2773 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2774 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2775 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2776 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2777 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2778 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2779 deleting that file.
2780 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2781 (not from the directory you expected).
2782 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2783 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2784 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2785 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2786 the space required.
2787
2788 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2789 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2790
2791 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2792 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2793 problem.
2794
2795 *** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
2796
2797 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2798 C backtrace printed by GDB:
2799
2800 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2801 (gdb) where
2802 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2803 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2804 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2805 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
2806
2807 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2808 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2809 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2810 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2811 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2812 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2813 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2814 distribution:
2815
2816 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2817 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2818 know what's really going on here. */
2819 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2820 0x10000000. */
2821 #if defined __linux__
2822 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2823 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2824 #endif
2825 #endif
2826 #endif /* 0 */
2827
2828 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2829 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2830 should now succeed.
2831
2832 *** OpenBSD 4.0 macppc: Segfault during dumping.
2833
2834 The build aborts with signal 11 when the command `./temacs --batch
2835 --load loadup bootstrap' tries to load files.el. A workaround seems
2836 to be to reduce the level of compiler optimization used during the
2837 build (from -O2 to -O1). It is possible this is an OpenBSD
2838 GCC problem specific to the macppc architecture, possibly only
2839 occurring with older versions of GCC (e.g. 3.3.5).
2840
2841 *** openSUSE 10.3: Segfault in bcopy during dumping.
2842
2843 This is due to a bug in the bcopy implementation in openSUSE 10.3.
2844 It is/will be fixed in an openSUSE update.
2845
2846 ** Installation
2847
2848 *** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
2849
2850 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2851 supplies the `install-info' command.
2852
2853 *** Installing to a directory with spaces in the name fails.
2854
2855 For example, if you call configure with a directory-related option
2856 with spaces in the value, eg --enable-locallisppath='/path/with\ spaces'.
2857 Using directory paths with spaces is not supported at this time: you
2858 must re-configure without using spaces.
2859
2860 *** Installing to a directory with non-ASCII characters in the name fails.
2861
2862 Installation may fail, or the Emacs executable may not start
2863 correctly, if a directory name containing non-ASCII characters is used
2864 as a `configure' argument (e.g. `--prefix'). The problem can also
2865 occur if a non-ASCII directory is specified in the EMACSLOADPATH
2866 envvar.
2867
2868 *** On Solaris, use GNU Make when installing an out-of-tree build
2869
2870 The Emacs configuration process allows you to configure the
2871 build environment so that you can build emacs in a directory
2872 outside of the distribution tree. When installing Emacs from an
2873 out-of-tree build directory on Solaris, you may need to use GNU
2874 make. The make programs bundled with Solaris support the VPATH
2875 macro but use it differently from the way the VPATH macro is
2876 used by GNU make. The differences will cause the "make install"
2877 step to fail, leaving you with an incomplete emacs
2878 installation. GNU make is available in /usr/sfw/bin on Solaris
2879 10 and can be installed as /opt/sfw/bin/gmake from the Solaris 9
2880 Software Companion CDROM.
2881
2882 The problems due to the VPATH processing differences affect only
2883 out of tree builds so, if you are on a Solaris installation
2884 without GNU make, you can install Emacs completely by installing
2885 from a build environment using the original emacs distribution tree.
2886
2887 ** First execution
2888
2889 *** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
2890
2891 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2892 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2893 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2894 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
2895
2896 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
2897
2898 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2899 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
2900
2901 *** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2902
2903 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2904
2905 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2906 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2907 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2908 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2909
2910 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2911 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2912 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2913 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2914 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2915
2916 * Emacs 19 problems
2917
2918 ** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
2919
2920 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2921 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2922 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2923 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2924
2925 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2926
2927 * Runtime problems on legacy systems
2928
2929 This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2930 If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2931 it is unlikely you will see any of these.
2932
2933 ** Ancient operating systems
2934
2935 AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2936
2937 *** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2938
2939 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2940 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2941
2942 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2943 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2944 X11Dev... with smit.
2945
2946 (This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2947
2948 *** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2949
2950 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2951 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2952 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2953 treated as control characters.
2954
2955 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2956 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2957
2958 *** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2959
2960 Could not load program emacs
2961 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2962 Error was: Exec format error
2963
2964 or this one:
2965
2966 Could not load program .emacs
2967 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2968 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2969 Error was: Exec format error
2970
2971 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2972 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2973
2974 *** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
2975
2976 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
2977 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
2978
2979 *** ISC Unix
2980
2981 **** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2982
2983 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2984 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2985 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2986 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2987 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2988
2989 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2990 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2991
2992 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2993
2994 **** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
2995
2996 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2997 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2998 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2999 communicating through pipes.
3000
3001 *** Irix
3002
3003 *** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
3004
3005 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
3006 as of 8 Dec 1998.
3007
3008 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
3009
3010 *** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
3011 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
3012
3013 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
3014
3015 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
3016 003082 August 11, 1998.
3017
3018 *** OPENSTEP
3019
3020 **** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
3021
3022 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
3023 following message:
3024
3025 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
3026
3027 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
3028 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
3029 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
3030
3031 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
3032 {
3033 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
3034 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
3035
3036 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
3037 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
3038
3039 *** Solaris 2.x
3040
3041 **** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
3042
3043 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
3044 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
3045 as GCC.
3046
3047 **** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
3048
3049 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
3050 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
3051 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
3052
3053 **** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
3054
3055 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
3056 version of Solaris that you are using.
3057
3058 **** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
3059
3060 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
3061 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
3062
3063 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
3064
3065 **** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
3066
3067 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
3068 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
3069 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
3070 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
3071 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
3072
3073 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
3074 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
3075 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
3076 for certain.
3077
3078 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
3079 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
3080 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
3081
3082 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
3083 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
3084
3085 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
3086 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
3087
3088 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
3089 Solaris 2.5.
3090
3091 **** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
3092 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
3093
3094 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
3095 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
3096
3097 #if ThreadedX
3098 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3099 #endif
3100
3101 to:
3102
3103 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
3104 #if ThreadedX
3105 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3106 #endif
3107 #endif
3108
3109 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
3110 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
3111 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
3112 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
3113 definition for your type of machine and system.
3114
3115 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
3116 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
3117 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
3118
3119 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
3120 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
3121 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
3122 patch.
3123
3124 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
3125 he changed
3126 #define ThreadedX YES
3127 to
3128 #define ThreadedX NO
3129 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
3130 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
3131 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
3132
3133 **** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
3134
3135 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
3136 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
3137 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
3138 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
3139 described in the Solaris FAQ
3140 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
3141 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
3142
3143 **** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
3144 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
3145 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
3146 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
3147 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
3148 and the default CFLAGS.
3149
3150 **** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
3151
3152 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
3153 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
3154 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
3155 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
3156 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
3157 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
3158 are currently recommended for your host.
3159
3160 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
3161 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
3162 105284-18 might fix it again.
3163
3164 **** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
3165
3166 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
3167 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
3168 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
3169 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
3170
3171 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
3172 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
3173 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
3174 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
3175 should do.
3176
3177 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
3178 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
3179 libraries.
3180
3181 *** HP/UX versions before 11.0
3182
3183 HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
3184 HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
3185
3186 **** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
3187
3188 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
3189 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
3190 does not happen.
3191
3192 *** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
3193
3194 See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
3195
3196 *** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
3197
3198 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
3199 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
3200 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
3201 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
3202 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
3203 install them and rebuild Emacs.
3204
3205 *** Ultrix and Digital Unix
3206
3207 **** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
3208
3209 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
3210 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
3211 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
3212 hand.
3213
3214 **** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
3215
3216 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
3217 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
3218 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
3219 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
3220 in Emacs.
3221
3222 **** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
3223
3224 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
3225 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
3226 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
3227 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
3228
3229 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
3230 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
3231
3232 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
3233 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
3234 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
3235 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
3236
3237 *** SVr4
3238
3239 **** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
3240
3241 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
3242 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
3243 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
3244
3245 **** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
3246
3247 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
3248 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
3249 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
3250
3251 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
3252 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
3253 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
3254 configure script) that reads:
3255 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
3256 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
3257 the kernel bug.
3258
3259 *** Irix 5 and earlier
3260
3261 Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
3262 shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
3263
3264 **** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
3265
3266 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
3267 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
3268 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
3269 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
3270 syms.h.
3271
3272 **** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
3273
3274 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
3275 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
3276 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
3277 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
3278 command `swap -l'.
3279
3280 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
3281 line like this:
3282
3283 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
3284
3285 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
3286 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
3287 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
3288 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
3289 information.
3290
3291 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
3292 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
3293 on the network that can log on to the host.
3294
3295 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
3296 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
3297 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
3298 icons.
3299
3300 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
3301 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
3302 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
3303 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
3304
3305 **** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
3306
3307 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
3308 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
3309
3310 **** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
3311
3312 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
3313 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
3314 find that string, and take out the spaces.
3315
3316 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
3317
3318 *** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3319
3320 **** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3321
3322 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3323 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3324 fonts, so it does not work.
3325
3326 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3327 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3328 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3329 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3330 resources affect Emacs also:
3331
3332 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3333 *Background: scoBackground
3334 *Foreground: scoForeground
3335
3336 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3337 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3338
3339 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3340 Emacs*Background: white
3341 Emacs*Foreground: black
3342
3343 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3344 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3345 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3346 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3347 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3348 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3349 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3350 Open Desktop display.
3351
3352 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3353 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3354
3355 **** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3356
3357 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3358 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3359 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3360 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3361 GCC.
3362
3363 **** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3364
3365 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3366 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3367 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3368 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3369 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3370 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3371
3372 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3373 But you have to be root to do it.
3374
3375 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3376
3377 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3378 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3379 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3380 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3381 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3382
3383 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3384 These changes take effect when you reboot.
3385
3386 *** Linux 1.x
3387
3388 **** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
3389
3390 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3391 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3392 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
3393
3394 **** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3395 truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
3396
3397 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
3398 1.3.75.
3399
3400 ** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3401
3402 *** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3403
3404 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3405 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3406
3407 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3408 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3409 with the user.
3410
3411 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3412 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3413 communicate with the subprocess.
3414
3415 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3416 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3417 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3418 stdin.
3419
3420 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3421
3422 For Perl 4:
3423
3424 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3425 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3426 ***************
3427 *** 68,74 ****
3428 $rcfile=".perldb";
3429 }
3430 else {
3431 ! $console = "con";
3432 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3433 }
3434
3435 --- 68,74 ----
3436 $rcfile=".perldb";
3437 }
3438 else {
3439 ! $console = "";
3440 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3441 }
3442
3443
3444 For Perl 5:
3445 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3446 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3447 ***************
3448 *** 22,28 ****
3449 $rcfile=".perldb";
3450 }
3451 elsif (-e "con") {
3452 ! $console = "con";
3453 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3454 }
3455 else {
3456 --- 22,28 ----
3457 $rcfile=".perldb";
3458 }
3459 elsif (-e "con") {
3460 ! $console = "";
3461 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3462 }
3463 else {
3464
3465 *** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3466
3467 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3468 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3469
3470 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3471
3472 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3473 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3474 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3475 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3476
3477 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3478
3479 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3480 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3481 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3482 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3483 PATH.
3484
3485 ** MS-DOS
3486
3487 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
3488
3489 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3490 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3491 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3492 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3493 the front of your PATH environment variable.
3494
3495 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3496 like make-docfile.
3497
3498 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3499 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3500 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
3501 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
3502
3503 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
3504
3505 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
3506
3507 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3508 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3509 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3510 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3511 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3512 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3513 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3514 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3515 your system works as before.
3516
3517 *** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
3518
3519 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3520 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3521 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3522 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3523 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
3524
3525 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3526 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3527 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3528 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
3529
3530 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3531 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3532 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3533 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3534 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
3535
3536 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3537 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3538 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
3539
3540 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3541 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3542 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
3543
3544 *** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
3545
3546 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
3547
3548 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3549 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3550 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
3551
3552 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3553 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3554 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3555 incorrect library functions.
3556
3557 *** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3558 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
3559
3560 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3561 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3562 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3563 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
3564
3565 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3566 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3567 Lisp.
3568
3569 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3570 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3571 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3572 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3573 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3574 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
3575 explains this issue in more detail.
3576
3577 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3578 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3579 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3580 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3581 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3582 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3583 properly truncated.
3584
3585 ** Archaic window managers and toolkits
3586
3587 *** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
3588
3589 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3590 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3591 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3592 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3593 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
3594
3595 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
3596
3597 **** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
3598
3599 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3600 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
3601
3602 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
3603
3604 ** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
3605
3606 *** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
3607
3608 This shell command should fix it:
3609
3610 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
3611
3612 *** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3613 as a concentrator.
3614
3615 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
3616 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
3617
3618 * Build problems on legacy systems
3619
3620 ** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
3621
3622 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3623 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3624 such as bash.
3625
3626 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3627 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
3628
3629 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3630 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
3631
3632 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
3633
3634 This problem manifests itself as an error message
3635
3636 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
3637
3638 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3639 were built for an older system version,
3640
3641 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
3642
3643 made the problem go away.
3644
3645 ** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
3646
3647 If you get errors such as
3648
3649 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3650 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3651 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
3652
3653 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3654 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3655 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3656 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3657 ones available when you build Emacs.
3658
3659 ** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
3660
3661 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
3662
3663 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
3664
3665 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
3666
3667 ** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
3668
3669 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3670 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3671 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
3672
3673 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3674 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
3675
3676 ** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
3677
3678 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3679 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3680 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3681 with a floating point option other than the default.
3682
3683 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3684 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3685 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3686 floating point option: -fsoft.
3687
3688 ** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3689
3690 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3691
3692 ** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3693
3694 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3695
3696 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3697 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3698
3699 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3700 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3701 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3702 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3703 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3704 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3705 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3706
3707 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3708 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3709 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3710 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3711 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3712 Lisp_Object *args;
3713 ...
3714 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3715 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3716 Lisp_Object *args;
3717 Lisp_Object tem;
3718 ...
3719 tem = args[i];
3720 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3721 causes the problem to go away.
3722 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3723 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3724
3725 ** 68000 C compiler problems
3726
3727 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3728 These are some that have been observed.
3729
3730 *** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3731 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3732 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3733
3734 *** "cannot reclaim" error.
3735
3736 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3737 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3738 simpler expressions.
3739
3740 *** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3741
3742 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3743 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3744
3745 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3746
3747 lose (arg)
3748 struct foo arg;
3749 {
3750 test ((int *) arg.y);
3751 }
3752
3753 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3754 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3755 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3756
3757 This problem will only happen if USE_LISP_UNION_TYPE is manually
3758 defined in lisp.h.
3759
3760 *** C compilers lose on returning unions.
3761
3762 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3763 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3764 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3765
3766 This problem will only happen if USE_LISP_UNION_TYPE is manually
3767 defined in lisp.h.
3768
3769 \f
3770 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
3771
3772 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
3773 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
3774 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
3775 (at your option) any later version.
3776
3777 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
3778 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
3779 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
3780 GNU General Public License for more details.
3781
3782 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
3783 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
3784
3785 \f
3786 Local variables:
3787 mode: outline
3788 paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3789 end:
3790
3791 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a