+Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
+ 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
+ Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+See the end of the file for license conditions.
+
+
This file describes various problems that have been encountered
in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
and browsing through the outline headers.
}
return ret;
+** Emacs crashes on startup after a glibc upgrade.
+
+This is caused by a binary incompatible change to the malloc
+implementation in glibc 2.5.90-22. As a result, Emacs binaries built
+using prior versions of glibc crash when run under 2.5.90-22.
+
+This problem was first seen in pre-release versions of Fedora 7, and
+may be fixed in the final Fedora 7 release. To stop the crash from
+happening, first try upgrading to the newest version of glibc; if this
+does not work, rebuild Emacs with the same version of glibc that you
+will run it under. For details, see
+
+https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=239344
+
* Crash bugs
** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
+** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes when closing a display (x-close-connection).
+
+This happens because of bugs in Gtk+. Gtk+ 2.10 seems to be OK. See bug
+http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
+
+** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes on startup on Cygwin.
+
+A typical error message is
+ ***MEMORY-ERROR***: emacs[5172]: GSlice: failed to allocate 504 bytes
+ (alignment: 512): Function not implemented
+
+Emacs supplies its own malloc, but glib (part of Gtk+) calls memalign and on
+Cygwin, that becomes the Cygwin supplied memalign. As malloc is not the
+Cygwin malloc, the Cygwin memalign always returns ENOSYS. A fix for this
+problem would be welcome.
+
* General runtime problems
** Lisp problems
IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
-If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
-prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
-you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
-`mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
-
- chgrp mail movemail
- chmod 2755 movemail
-
If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
*** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
+For example, (system-name) returns some variation on
+"localhost.localdomain", rather the name you were expecting.
+
You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
-either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
-calls for specifying this.
+(i.e. a name with at least one ".") either in /etc/hosts,
+/etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system calls for specifying
+this.
If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
mail-host-address to the value you want.
problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
if ($?EMACS) then
- if ($EMACS == "t") then
+ if ("$EMACS" =~ /*) then
unset edit
stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
endif
You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
-display all the characters Emacs supports.
+display all the characters Emacs supports. The etl-unicode collection
+of fonts (available from <URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/fonts/> and
+<URL:ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/mirror/X.Org/contrib/fonts/>) includes
+fonts that can display many Unicode characters; they can also be used
+by ps-print and ps-mule to print Unicode characters.
Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
missing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur for
** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
-You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
+You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution
+or the etl-unicode collection (see the previous entry).
** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
* Internationalization problems
+** M-{ does not work on a Spanish PC keyboard.
+
+Many Spanish keyboards seem to ignore that combination. Emacs can't
+do anything about it.
+
** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
+ ;; The only way the function is used in this package is included
+ ;; in `mucs-package-definition-end-hook' value, where it must
+ ;; return (possibly empty) *list* of forms. Do this. Do not rely
-+ ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)'
++ ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)'
+ ;; form.
+ `((setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
+ (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
+ ,@result)))
-
+
;;; Add hook for embedding translation informations to a package.
(add-hook 'mucs-package-definition-end-hook
Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
-*** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux.
+*** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method).
Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program
which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users
Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.
+The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx
+(Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. If
+you want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitx
+by another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or be
+accustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'.
+
*** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
+*** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM.
+
+This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later
+is running. If gnome-settings-daemon is not running, Emacs receives
+input through XIM without any problem. Furthermore, this seems only
+to happen in *.UTF-8 locales; zh_CN.GB2312 and zh_CN.GBK locales, for
+example, work fine. A bug report has been filed in the Gnome
+bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357032
+
*** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
emulation for which it is set up.
Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
-Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
+LessTif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
--enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
+"undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the
+X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where
+X expects to find it.
+
*** Improving performance with slow X connections.
There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
package.
2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
- switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
+ switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the
+ following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only
+ after the the initial frame is displayed:
+
+ (scroll-bar-mode -1)
+ (menu-bar-mode -1)
+ (tool-bar-mode -1)
+
+ For still quicker startup, put these X resources in your .Xdefaults
+ file:
+
+ Emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
+ Emacs.menuBar: off
+ Emacs.toolBar: off
3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
- instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate
+ instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a separate
packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
-noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
For more about lbxproxy, see:
http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
+5) If copying and killing is slow, try to disable the interaction with the
+ native system's clipboard by adding these lines to your .emacs file:
+ (setq interprogram-cut-function nil)
+ (setq interprogram-paste-function nil)
+
*** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
in your site-init.el file.
-* Runtime problems on character termunals
+* Runtime problems on character terminals
** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
-*** GNU/Linux: low startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
+*** GNU/Linux: slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
+*** Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Carbon): QuickTime 7.0.4 updater breaks build.
+
+On the above environment, build fails at the link stage with the
+message like "Undefined symbols: _HICopyAccessibilityActionDescription
+referenced from QuickTime expected to be defined in Carbon". A
+workaround is to use QuickTime 7.0.1 reinstaller.
+
** FreeBSD
*** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
* Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
+** Windows 95 and networking.
+
+To support server sockets, Emacs 22.1 loads ws2_32.dll. If this file
+is missing, all Emacs networking features are disabled.
+
+Old versions of Windows 95 may not have the required DLL. To use
+Emacs' networking features on Windows 95, you must install the
+"Windows Socket 2" update available from MicroSoft's support Web.
+
** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
+When "ClearType" method is selected as the "method to smooth edges of
+screen fonts" (in Display Properties, Appearance tab, under
+"Effects"), there are various problems related to display of
+characters: 2-pixel trace is left behind when moving overlays, bold
+fonts can be hard to read, small portions of some characters could
+appear chopped, etc. This happens because, under ClearType,
+characters are drawn outside their advertised bounding box. Emacs 21
+disabled the use of ClearType, whereas Emacs 22 allows it and has some
+code to enlarge the width of the bounding box. Apparently, this
+display feature needs more changes to get it 100% right. A workaround
+is to disable ClearType.
+
There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
-Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. Some
+Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. However, some
of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
-characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
-work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
-you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
-the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
-ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
-appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
-yet.)
+characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make these
+input methods work with Emacs, set the keyboard coding system to the
+appropriate value after you activate the Windows input method. For
+example, if you activate the Hebrew input method, type this:
+
+ C-x RET k hebrew-iso-8bit RET
+
+(Emacs ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up
+the appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do
+that yet.) In addition, to use these Windows input methods, you
+should set your "Language for non-Unicode programs" (on Windows XP,
+this is on the Advanced tab of Regional Settings) to the language of
+the input method.
+
+To bind keys that produce non-ASCII characters with modifiers, you
+must specify raw byte codes. For instance, if you want to bind
+META-a-grave to a command, you need to specify this in your `~/.emacs':
+
+ (global-set-key [?\M-\340] ...)
+
+The above example is for the Latin-1 environment where the byte code
+of the encoded a-grave is 340 octal. For other environments, use the
+encoding appropriate to that environment.
The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
library function.
+Files larger than 4GB cause overflow in the size (represented as a
+32-bit integer) reported by `file-attributes'. This affects Dired as
+well, since the Windows port uses a Lisp emulation of `ls' that relies
+on `file-attributes'.
+
** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
+** Cygwin build of Emacs hangs after rebasing Cygwin DLLs
+
+Usually, on Cygwin, one needs to rebase the DLLs if an application
+aborts with a message like this:
+
+ C:\cygwin\bin\python.exe: *** unable to remap C:\cygwin\bin\cygssl.dll to
+ same address as parent(0xDF0000) != 0xE00000
+
+However, since Cygwin DLL 1.5.17 was released, after such rebasing,
+Emacs hangs.
+
+This was reported to happen for Emacs 21.2 and also for the pretest of
+Emacs 22.1 on Cygwin.
+
+To work around this, build Emacs like this:
+
+ LDFLAGS='-Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base' ./configure
+ make LD='$(CC)'
+ make LD='$(CC)' install
+
+This produces an Emacs binary that is independent of rebasing.
+
+Note that you _must_ use LD='$(CC)' in the last two commands above, to
+prevent GCC from passing the "--image-base 0x20000000" option to the
+linker, which is what it does by default. That option produces an
+Emacs binary with the base address 0x20000000, which will cause Emacs
+to hang after Cygwin DLLs are rebased.
+
** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
+*** `configure' warns ``accepted by the compiler, rejected by the preprocessor''.
+
+This indicates a mismatch between the C compiler and preprocessor that
+configure is using. For example, on Solaris 10 trying to use
+CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc (the Sun Studio compiler) together with
+CPP=/usr/ccs/lib/cpp can result in errors of this form (you may also
+see the error ``"/usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h", line 500: undefined control'').
+
+The solution is to tell configure to use the correct C preprocessor
+for your C compiler (CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E" in the above
+example).
+
+*** `configure' fails with ``"junk.c", line 660: invalid input token: 8.elc''
+
+The final stage of the Emacs configure process uses the C preprocessor
+to generate the Makefiles. Errors of this form can occur if the C
+preprocessor inserts extra whitespace into its output. The solution
+is to find the switches that stop your preprocessor from inserting extra
+whitespace, add them to CPPFLAGS, and re-run configure. For example,
+this error can occur on Solaris 10 when using the Sun Studio compiler
+``Sun C 5.8'' with its preprocessor CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E".
+The relevant switch in this case is "-Xs" (``compile assuming
+(pre-ANSI) K & R C style code'').
+
** Compilation
*** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
-(RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
+(Red Hat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
Emacs's configure script.
-*** Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
+*** Building a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit GNU/Linux architecture.
+
+First ensure that the necessary 32-bit system libraries and include
+files are installed. Then use:
+
+ env CC="gcc -m32" ./configure --build=i386-linux-gnu \
+ --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
+
+(using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system).
+
+*** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC versions
+
+Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
+reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time. In
+addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
+info. Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
+compiling Emacs. GCC versions 4.0.3, 4.0.4, 4.1.1, and 4.1.2
+reportedly build a working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend
+these GCC versions. Note that these versions of GCC, 4.0.3, 4.0.4,
+4.1.1, and 4.1.2, are currently the _only_ versions known to succeed
+in building Emacs (as of v22.1).
+
+*** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
patch to assert.h should solve this:
-*** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
---- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
-***************
-*** 41,47 ****
- /*
- * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
- */
-! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
+ *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
+ --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
+ ***************
+ *** 41,47 ****
+ /*
+ * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
+ */
+ ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
+
+ #else /* debugging enabled */
+
+ --- 41,47 ----
+ /*
+ * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
+ */
+ ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
- #else /* debugging enabled */
+ #else /* debugging enabled */
---- 41,47 ----
- /*
- * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
- */
-! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
- #else /* debugging enabled */
+*** Building the MS-Windows port with Visual Studio 2005 fails.
+Microsoft no longer ships the single threaded version of the C library
+with their compiler, and the multithreaded static library is missing
+some functions that Microsoft have deemed non-threadsafe. The
+dynamically linked C library has all the functions, but there is a
+conflict between the versions of malloc in the DLL and in Emacs, which
+is not resolvable due to the way Windows does dynamic linking.
+
+We recommend the use of the MingW port of GCC for compiling Emacs, as
+not only does it not suffer these problems, but it is also Free
+software like Emacs.
** Linking
*** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
-With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Redhat Fedora Core
+With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Red Hat Fedora Core
1 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs tries
to handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, these
setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
-
+
*** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.
In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during
or
- setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
+ setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
*** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
should now succeed.
+*** OpenBSD 4.0 macppc: Segfault during dumping.
+
+The build aborts with signal 11 when the command `./temacs --batch
+--load loadup bootstrap' tries to load files.el. A workaround seems
+to be to reduce the level of compiler optimization used during the
+build (from -O2 to -O1). It is possible this is an OpenBSD
+GCC problem specific to the macppc architecture, possibly only
+occurring with older versions of GCC (e.g. 3.3.5).
+
** Installation
*** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
supplies the `install-info' command.
+*** Installing to a directory with spaces in the name fails.
+
+For example, if you call configure with a directory-related option
+with spaces in the value, eg --enable-locallisppath='/path/with\ spaces'.
+Using directory paths with spaces is not supported at this time: you
+must re-configure without using spaces.
+
+*** Installing to a directory with non-ASCII characters in the name fails.
+
+Installation may fail, or the Emacs executable may not start
+correctly, if a directory name containing non-ASCII characters is used
+as a `configure' argument (e.g. `--prefix'). The problem can also
+occur if a non-ASCII directory is specified in the EMACSLOADPATH
+envvar.
+
+*** On Solaris, use GNU Make when installing an out-of-tree build
+
+The Emacs configuration process allows you to configure the
+build environment so that you can build emacs in a directory
+outside of the distribution tree. When installing Emacs from an
+out-of-tree build directory on Solaris, you may need to use GNU
+make. The make programs bundled with Solaris support the VPATH
+macro but use it differently from the way the VPATH macro is
+used by GNU make. The differences will cause the "make install"
+step to fail, leaving you with an incomplete emacs
+installation. GNU make is available in /usr/sfw/bin on Solaris
+10 and can be installed as /opt/sfw/bin/gmake from the Solaris 9
+Software Companion CDROM.
+
+The problems due to the VPATH processing differences affect only
+out of tree builds so, if you are on a Solaris installation
+without GNU make, you can install Emacs completely by installing
+from a build environment using the original emacs distribution tree.
+
** First execution
*** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
\f
-Copyright 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
- 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+This file is part of GNU Emacs.
+
+GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
+it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
+any later version.
-Copying and redistribution of this file with or without modification
-are permitted without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
+GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
+but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
+GNU General Public License for more details.
+You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
+along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
+Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
+Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
+
+\f
Local variables:
mode: outline
paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
HCoop / bpt / emacs.git / blobdiff