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1 Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
2 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
3 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 See the end of the file for license conditions.
5
6
7 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
8 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
9 and browsing through the outline headers.
10
11 * Mule-UCS doesn't work in Emacs 23.
12
13 It's completely redundant now, as far as we know.
14
15 * Emacs startup failures
16
17 ** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
18
19 A typical error message might be something like
20
21 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
22
23 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
24 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
25 are:
26
27 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
28
29 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
30 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
31 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
32
33 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
34 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
35 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
36
37 ** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
38
39 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
40 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
41 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
42 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
43 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
44 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
45 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
46 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
47 not to work.
48
49 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
50 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
51 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
52 same directory where system header files are kept.
53
54 ** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
55
56 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
57 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
58 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
59 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
60 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
61 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
62
63 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
64 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
65 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
66 it constitutes a separate package.
67
68 ** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
69
70 The typical error message might be like this:
71
72 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
73
74 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
75 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
76 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
77 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
78 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
79 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
80 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
81
82 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
83 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
84
85 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
86 file.
87
88 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
89 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
90 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
91
92 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
93
94 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
95 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
96 load-path.
97
98 ** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
99
100 An example of such an error is:
101
102 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
103
104 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
105 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
106 present in load-path:
107
108 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
109
110 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
111 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
112 load-path.
113
114 ** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
115
116 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
117
118 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
119 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
120 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
121 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
122 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
123 /******************************************************************
124
125 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
126 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
127 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
128 XLCd lcd;
129 {
130 - char* begin;
131 - char* end;
132 + char* begin = NULL;
133 + char* end = NULL;
134 char* ret;
135 int i = 0;
136 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
137 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
138 }
139 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
140 if (ret != NULL) {
141 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
142 + if (begin != NULL) {
143 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
144 + } else {
145 + ret[0] = '\0';
146 + }
147 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
148 }
149 return ret;
150
151 ** Emacs crashes on startup after a glibc upgrade.
152
153 This is caused by a binary incompatible change to the malloc
154 implementation in glibc 2.5.90-22. As a result, Emacs binaries built
155 using prior versions of glibc crash when run under 2.5.90-22.
156
157 This problem was first seen in pre-release versions of Fedora 7, and
158 may be fixed in the final Fedora 7 release. To stop the crash from
159 happening, first try upgrading to the newest version of glibc; if this
160 does not work, rebuild Emacs with the same version of glibc that you
161 will run it under. For details, see
162
163 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=239344
164
165 * Crash bugs
166
167 ** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
168
169 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
170 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
171 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
172 happens to exist on your X server).
173
174 ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
175
176 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
177 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
178 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
179
180 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
181 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
182
183 ** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
184 a segmentation fault and core dump.
185
186 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
187 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
188
189 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
190
191 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
192 untar it :-).
193
194 ** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
195 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
196 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
197 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
198 older version.
199
200 ** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
201
202 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
203 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
204 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
205 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
206 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
207
208 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
209 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
210 terminfo when built.
211
212 ** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
213
214 If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
215 reported to prevent the crashes.
216
217 ** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
218
219 It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
220
221 This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
222 the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
223 flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
224 necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
225
226 On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
227 configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
228
229 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes when closing a display (x-close-connection).
230
231 This happens because of bugs in Gtk+. Gtk+ 2.10 seems to be OK. See bug
232 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
233
234 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes on startup on Cygwin.
235
236 A typical error message is
237 ***MEMORY-ERROR***: emacs[5172]: GSlice: failed to allocate 504 bytes
238 (alignment: 512): Function not implemented
239
240 Emacs supplies its own malloc, but glib (part of Gtk+) calls memalign and on
241 Cygwin, that becomes the Cygwin supplied memalign. As malloc is not the
242 Cygwin malloc, the Cygwin memalign always returns ENOSYS. A fix for this
243 problem would be welcome.
244
245 * General runtime problems
246
247 ** Lisp problems
248
249 *** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
250
251 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
252 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
253 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
254 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
255
256 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
257 than the corresponding .el file.
258
259 *** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
260
261 These control the actions of Emacs.
262 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
263 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
264 "load" will search.
265
266 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
267 of them, then try again.
268
269 *** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
270
271 The error message might be something like this:
272
273 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
274
275 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
276 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
277 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
278 corrects that.
279
280 *** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
281
282 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
283 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
284 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
285
286 *** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
287 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
288 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
289 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
290
291 ** Keyboard problems
292
293 *** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
294
295 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
296 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
297 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
298 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
299 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
300 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
301
302 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
303 them to two different keys.
304
305 *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
306
307 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
308 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
309 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
310
311 *** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
312 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
313
314 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
315 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
316 another escape character in kermit. One user did
317
318 set escape-character 17
319
320 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
321
322 ** Mailers and other helper programs
323
324 *** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
325
326 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
327 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
328 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
329 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
330 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
331 old POP protocol.
332
333 *** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
334
335 RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
336 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
337 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
338
339 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
340 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
341 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
342 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
343 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
344 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
345 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
346
347 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
348 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
349 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
350 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
351 make install.
352
353 chgrp mail movemail
354 chmod 2755 movemail
355
356 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
357 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
358 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
359 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
360 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
361 directory copy is ineffective.
362
363 *** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
364
365 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
366 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
367
368 ** Problems with hostname resolution
369
370 *** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
371 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
372 *** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
373 *** Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
374
375 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
376 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
377 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
378 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
379
380 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
381 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
382
383 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
384 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
385
386 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
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 ** Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
735
736 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
737 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
738 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
739
740 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
741 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
742 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
743
744 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
745 display all the characters Emacs supports. The etl-unicode collection
746 of fonts (available from <URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/fonts/> and
747 <URL:ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/mirror/X.Org/contrib/fonts/>) includes
748 fonts that can display many Unicode characters; they can also be used
749 by ps-print and ps-mule to print Unicode characters.
750
751 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
752 missing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur for
753 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
754 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
755 of this character to display a space.
756
757 ** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
758
759 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution
760 or the etl-unicode collection (see the previous entry).
761
762 ** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
763
764 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
765 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
766 lines do not overlap.
767
768 ** Loading fonts is very slow.
769
770 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
771 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
772 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
773 "fonts.scale".
774
775 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
776 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
777
778 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
779 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
780 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
781
782 ** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
783
784 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
785 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
786 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
787 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
788 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
789 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
790 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
791 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
792 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
793 to the end of a very large buffer.
794
795 Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
796 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
797 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
798 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
799
800 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
801 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
802 fontification by setting the variable
803 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
804 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
805
806 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
807 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
808
809 ** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
810 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
811
812 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
813 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
814 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
815
816 ** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
817
818 This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
819 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
820 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
821 the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
822 fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
823 Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
824 and then start the application again.
825 If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
826 application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
827 of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
828 sufficient to recompile Qt.
829
830 ** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
831
832 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
833 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
834 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
835 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
836
837 A workaround for this is to add something like
838
839 emacs.waitForWM: false
840
841 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
842 frame's parameter list, like this:
843
844 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
845
846 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
847
848 ** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
849
850 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
851 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
852 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
853 problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
854 `.emacs'.
855
856 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
857 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
858 property.
859
860 ** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
861
862 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
863 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
864 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
865 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
866 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
867
868 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
869 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
870
871 ** Subscript/superscript text in TeX is hard to read.
872
873 If `tex-fontify-script' is non-nil, tex-mode displays
874 subscript/superscript text in the faces subscript/superscript, which
875 are smaller than the normal font and lowered/raised. With some fonts,
876 nested superscripts (say) can be hard to read. Switching to a
877 different font, or changing your antialiasing setting (on an LCD
878 screen), can both make the problem disappear. Alternatively, customize
879 the following variables: tex-font-script-display (how much to
880 lower/raise); tex-suscript-height-ratio (how much smaller than
881 normal); tex-suscript-height-minimum (minimum height).
882
883 * Internationalization problems
884
885 ** M-{ does not work on a Spanish PC keyboard.
886
887 Many Spanish keyboards seem to ignore that combination. Emacs can't
888 do anything about it.
889
890 ** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
891
892 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
893 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
894 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
895 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
896 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
897 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
898 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
899 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
900 include in the fontset spec:
901
902 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
903 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
904 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
905
906 ** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
907
908 Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in the
909 ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts of
910 CJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets:
911
912 GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601
913
914 The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on by
915 default). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacs
916 charset is decided by the current language environment. For instance,
917 in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312.
918
919 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
920 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
921 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
922 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
923 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
924 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
925 information.
926
927 ** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
928
929 Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
930 library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
931 following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
932 though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
933 distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
934
935 --- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
936 +++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
937 @@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
938
939 (mapcar
940 (lambda (x)
941 - (mapcar
942 - (lambda (y)
943 - (mucs-define-coding-system
944 - (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
945 - (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
946 - (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
947 - (cdr x)))
948 + (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
949 + ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
950 + ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
951 + ;; system definitions.
952 + (let ((y (cadr x)))
953 + (mucs-define-coding-system
954 + (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
955 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
956 + (mapcar
957 + (lambda (y)
958 + (mucs-define-coding-system
959 + (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
960 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
961 + (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
962 + (cdr x)))
963 `((utf-8
964 (utf-8-unix
965 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
966
967 Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
968 Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
969
970 ** Mule-UCS compilation problem.
971
972 Emacs of old versions and XEmacs byte-compile the form `(progn progn
973 ...)' the same way as `(progn ...)', but Emacs of version 21.3 and the
974 later process that form just as interpreter does, that is, as `progn'
975 variable reference. Apply the following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 to
976 make it compiled by the latest Emacs.
977
978 --- mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 00:42:23 -0000 1.1.1.1
979 +++ mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 01:31:51 -0000 1.3
980 @@ -639,10 +639,14 @@
981 (mucs-notify-embedment 'mucs-ccl-required name)
982 (setq ccl-pgm-list (cdr ccl-pgm-list)))
983 ; (message "MCCLREGFIN:%S" result)
984 - `(progn
985 - (setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
986 - (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
987 - ,@result)))
988 + ;; The only way the function is used in this package is included
989 + ;; in `mucs-package-definition-end-hook' value, where it must
990 + ;; return (possibly empty) *list* of forms. Do this. Do not rely
991 + ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)'
992 + ;; form.
993 + `((setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
994 + (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
995 + ,@result)))
996
997 ;;; Add hook for embedding translation informations to a package.
998 (add-hook 'mucs-package-definition-end-hook
999
1000 ** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
1001
1002 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
1003 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
1004 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
1005 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
1006 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
1007 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
1008
1009 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
1010
1011 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
1012
1013 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
1014 problem.
1015
1016 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
1017 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
1018 `xset fp rehash'.
1019
1020 ** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
1021
1022 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
1023 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
1024 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
1025 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
1026 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
1027
1028 ** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1029
1030 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1031 (standard-display-european t)
1032 That should be changed to
1033 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1034
1035 * X runtime problems
1036
1037 ** X keyboard problems
1038
1039 *** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
1040
1041 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
1042 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
1043 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
1044 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
1045
1046 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
1047
1048 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
1049
1050 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
1051 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
1052 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
1053
1054 *** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
1055
1056 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
1057
1058 *** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method).
1059
1060 Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program
1061 which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users
1062 from using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'.
1063
1064 One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' file
1065 which can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory.
1066 However, that requires root access.
1067
1068 Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources.
1069
1070 Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.
1071
1072 The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx
1073 (Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. If
1074 you want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitx
1075 by another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or be
1076 accustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'.
1077
1078 *** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1079
1080 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1081 for character composition.
1082
1083 *** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1084
1085 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1086 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1087 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1088 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1089 purposes.
1090
1091 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1092 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1093
1094 *** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1095
1096 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1097 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1098 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1099 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1100 change this.
1101
1102 *** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
1103
1104 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
1105 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
1106 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
1107
1108 *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
1109 directly with an X server.
1110
1111 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
1112 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
1113 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
1114 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
1115 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
1116 have made the key binding correctly.
1117
1118 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
1119 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
1120 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
1121 default.
1122
1123 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
1124
1125 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
1126 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
1127
1128 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1129 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1130 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1131 modifier bit not otherwise used.
1132
1133 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1134 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1135 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1136 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
1137
1138 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1139 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
1140
1141 ** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
1142
1143 *** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM.
1144
1145 This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later
1146 is running. If gnome-settings-daemon is not running, Emacs receives
1147 input through XIM without any problem. Furthermore, this seems only
1148 to happen in *.UTF-8 locales; zh_CN.GB2312 and zh_CN.GBK locales, for
1149 example, work fine. A bug report has been filed in the Gnome
1150 bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357032
1151
1152 *** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
1153
1154 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1155 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1156 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1157 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1158 been filed.
1159
1160 *** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1161 or messed up.
1162
1163 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1164 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1165 background.
1166
1167 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1168 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1169 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1170 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1171 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1172
1173 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1174 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1175 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1176 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1177 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1178 present or commented out:
1179
1180 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1181 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1182 Emacs*Foreground
1183 Emacs*Background
1184
1185 It is also reported that a bug in the gtk-engines-qt engine can cause this if
1186 Emacs is compiled with Gtk+.
1187 The bug is fixed in version 0.7 or newer of gtk-engines-qt.
1188
1189 *** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1190
1191 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1192 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1193 of klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections,
1194 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1195 while, Emacs may print a message:
1196
1197 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1198
1199 A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
1200 comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
1201
1202 *** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1203
1204 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1205 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1206 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1207 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1208
1209 *** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1210 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1211 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1212 problem disappears.
1213
1214 *** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1215 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1216 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1217 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1218 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1219 used with neXtaw at run time.
1220
1221 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1222 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1223 built Emacs with.
1224
1225 *** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
1226
1227 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1228 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1229 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1230 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
1231
1232 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1233 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
1234
1235 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1236 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1237 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
1238
1239 *** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
1240
1241 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1242 emulation for which it is set up.
1243
1244 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
1245 LessTif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
1246 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1247 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1248 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1249 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1250 menu placement.
1251
1252 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1253 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1254 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1255 developers.
1256
1257 *** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1258
1259 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1260
1261 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1262
1263 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1264 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1265 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1266 the resource prevents the problem.
1267
1268 ** General X problems
1269
1270 *** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1271
1272 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1273 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1274 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1275 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1276
1277 Here's how to do this:
1278
1279 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1280
1281 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1282 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1283 to normal, do
1284
1285 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1286
1287 *** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
1288
1289 The messages might say something like this:
1290
1291 Unable to load color "grey95"
1292
1293 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
1294
1295 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
1296
1297 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1298 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1299 resources to load all the colors it needs.
1300
1301 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
1302
1303 "undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the
1304 X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where
1305 X expects to find it.
1306
1307 *** Improving performance with slow X connections.
1308
1309 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1310 be carried out at the same time:
1311
1312 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1313 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1314 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1315 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1316 package.
1317
1318 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
1319 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the
1320 following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only
1321 after the the initial frame is displayed:
1322
1323 (scroll-bar-mode -1)
1324 (menu-bar-mode -1)
1325 (tool-bar-mode -1)
1326
1327 For still quicker startup, put these X resources in your .Xdefaults
1328 file:
1329
1330 Emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
1331 Emacs.menuBar: off
1332 Emacs.toolBar: off
1333
1334 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1335 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
1336
1337 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1338 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1339 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1340 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1341 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
1342 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a separate
1343 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1344 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1345 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1346 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1347 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
1348
1349 5) If copying and killing is slow, try to disable the interaction with the
1350 native system's clipboard by adding these lines to your .emacs file:
1351 (setq interprogram-cut-function nil)
1352 (setq interprogram-paste-function nil)
1353
1354 *** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1355
1356 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1357 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1358 likely to cause it.
1359
1360 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1361
1362 *** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1363
1364 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1365 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1366
1367 *** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
1368
1369 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1370 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1371 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1372 the Files menu).
1373
1374 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1375 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1376 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1377 workaround can be found.
1378
1379 *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1380 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
1381
1382 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1383 emacs*Cursor: black
1384 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1385 that isn't a color.)
1386
1387 The fix is to correct your X resources.
1388
1389 *** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
1390
1391 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1392 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1393 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1394 font.
1395
1396 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1397 your font path, like this:
1398
1399 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
1400
1401 *** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
1402
1403 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
1404
1405 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
1406
1407 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1408 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1409 want, rewrite the resource.
1410
1411 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1412 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1413 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
1414
1415 *** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1416 *** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
1417
1418 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1419 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1420 the environment.
1421
1422 *** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
1423
1424 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1425 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1426 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
1427
1428 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1429 whether this problem is present on a given system.
1430
1431 *** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
1432
1433 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1434 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1435 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1436 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
1437
1438 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1439 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1440 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
1441
1442 The easy way to do this is to put
1443
1444 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
1445
1446 in your site-init.el file.
1447
1448 * Runtime problems on character terminals
1449
1450 ** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
1451
1452 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1453 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1454 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1455 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1456 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1457 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1458 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1459 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
1460
1461 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
1462
1463 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1464 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1465 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
1466
1467 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1468 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1469 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
1470 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1471 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1472 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
1473
1474 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1475 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1476 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1477 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1478 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1479 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1480 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1481 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1482 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
1483
1484 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1485 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1486 codes. You might as well try it.
1487
1488 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1489 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1490 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1491 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1492 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1493 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1494 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1495 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
1496
1497 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1498 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1499 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1500 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1501 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1502 control handling.)
1503
1504 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1505 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1506 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1507 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1508 other control characters are already used by emacs.
1509
1510 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1511 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1512 order to continue.
1513
1514 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1515 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1516 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1517 automatically. Here is an example:
1518
1519 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1520
1521 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1522 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1523 manually.
1524
1525 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1526 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1527 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1528 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1529 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1530 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1531 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1532 of inferior systems.
1533
1534 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
1535
1536 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1537 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1538 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1539 that wants to use flow control.
1540
1541 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1542 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1543 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
1544
1545 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1546 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1547 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
1548
1549 ** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
1550
1551 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1552 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1553 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
1554
1555 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1556 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1557 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1558 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1559 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1560 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1561 There are several possibilities:
1562
1563 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
1564
1565 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1566 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
1567
1568 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1569 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1570 by termcap.
1571
1572 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1573 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1574 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1575 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1576 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1577 tested on many kinds of terminals.
1578
1579 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
1580
1581 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1582 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1583 for certain terminals.
1584
1585 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1586 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
1587
1588 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1589 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
1590
1591 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
1592
1593 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1594 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1595 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1596 control on the local system.
1597
1598 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1599 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1600 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1601 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
1602
1603 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1604 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1605 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
1606
1607 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1608 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1609 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1610 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
1611
1612 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1613
1614 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1615 info.
1616
1617 ** Output from Control-V is slow.
1618
1619 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1620 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1621 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1622 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1623 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1624 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
1625
1626 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1627 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1628 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1629 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1630 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1631 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1632 time as the operations really take.
1633
1634 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1635 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1636 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1637 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1638 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1639 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1640 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1641 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1642 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1643 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
1644
1645 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1646 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1647 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1648 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1649 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1650 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1651 `cm' string.
1652
1653 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1654 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1655 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
1656
1657 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1658 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
1659
1660 ** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
1661
1662 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1663 after a day or two.
1664
1665 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1666 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1667 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1668 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1669 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1670 to it.
1671
1672 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1673 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1674 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1675 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1676 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1677 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
1678
1679 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1680 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1681 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1682 You can probably access help-command via f1.
1683
1684 ** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
1685
1686 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1687 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1688 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1689 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1690 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1691 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1692 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1693 "colors".
1694
1695 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1696 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1697 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1698 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1699 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1700 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1701 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1702 capability).
1703
1704 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1705 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1706 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1707 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
1708
1709 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1710 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1711 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1712 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1713 emulator.
1714
1715 Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line
1716 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1717 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1718 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
1719
1720 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1721 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1722 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1723 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1724 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1725 `global-font-lock-mode'.
1726
1727 * Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
1728
1729 ** GNU/Linux
1730
1731 *** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted.
1732
1733 There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs to
1734 read corrupted process output.
1735
1736 *** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption.
1737
1738 If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupted
1739 due to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc.
1740
1741 To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it
1742 executable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name of
1743 the script:
1744
1745 #!/bin/bash
1746 exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
1747 exec ssh "$@"
1748
1749 *** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1750 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1751
1752 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1753 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1754 known to work.
1755
1756 *** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1757 the Meta key stops working.
1758
1759 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1760 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1761 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1762 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1763 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1764 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1765 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1766
1767 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1768 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1769 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1770 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1771 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1772 modifier:
1773
1774 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1775
1776 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1777 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1778
1779 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1780
1781 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1782 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1783 keys can serve as Meta.
1784
1785 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1786 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1787
1788 *** GNU/Linux: slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1789
1790 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1791 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1792
1793 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1794 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1795 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1796 networked and non-networked machines.
1797
1798 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1799
1800 **** Networked Case.
1801
1802 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1803 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1804 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1805
1806 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
1807
1808 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1809 lines:
1810
1811 order hosts, bind
1812 multi on
1813
1814 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1815 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1816 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1817 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1818
1819 **** Non-Networked Case.
1820
1821 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1822 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1823 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1824 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1825 file is not necessary with this approach.
1826
1827 *** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
1828
1829 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1830 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1831 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1832 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1833 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1834 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1835 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1836 always blinks.
1837
1838 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1839 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1840 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1841 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1842 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1843 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
1844
1845 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1846 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1847 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1848 produce a modified terminfo entry.
1849
1850 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1851 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
1852
1853 *** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1854
1855 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1856 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1857 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1858 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1859
1860 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1861
1862 ** Mac OS X
1863
1864 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Environment Variables from dotfiles are ignored.
1865
1866 When starting Emacs from the Dock or the Finder on Mac OS X, the
1867 environment variables that are set up in dotfiles, such as .cshrc or
1868 .profile, are ignored. This is because the Finder and Dock are not
1869 started from a shell, but instead from the Window Manager itself.
1870
1871 The workaround for this is to create a .MacOSX/environment.plist file to
1872 setup these environment variables. These environment variables will
1873 apply to all processes regardless of where they are started.
1874 For me information, see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html.
1875
1876 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Process output truncated when using ptys.
1877
1878 There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
1879 Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
1880 leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
1881
1882 *** Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Carbon): QuickTime updater breaks build.
1883
1884 Some QuickTime updaters such as 7.0.4 and 7.2.0 are known to break
1885 build at the link stage with the message like "Undefined symbols:
1886 _HICopyAccessibilityActionDescription referenced from QuickTime
1887 expected to be defined in Carbon". A workaround is to use a QuickTime
1888 reinstaller. Alternatively, you can link with the frameworks in the
1889 corresponding SDK by specifying LDFLAGS as
1890 "-Wl,-F/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.3.0.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks".
1891
1892 ** FreeBSD
1893
1894 *** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1895 directories that have the +t bit.
1896
1897 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1898 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1899 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1900 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1901
1902 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1903 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1904
1905 *** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
1906
1907 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1908 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1909 current keymap to a file with the command
1910
1911 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
1912
1913 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1914 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1915 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1916 to look like this
1917
1918 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
1919
1920 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
1921
1922 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
1923
1924 ** HP-UX
1925
1926 *** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
1927
1928 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
1929
1930 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1931 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1932 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1933 but tty is giving it back 3.
1934
1935 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1936 word:
1937
1938 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
1939
1940 should be changed to:
1941
1942 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
1943
1944 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1945 and into .login.
1946
1947 *** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
1948
1949 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1950 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1951 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1952 value is just ten seconds.
1953
1954 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
1955
1956 *** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1957 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1958
1959 This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1960 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1961 configures the X server.
1962
1963 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1964 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1965 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1966 EOF
1967
1968 xmodmap - << EOF
1969 clear mod1
1970 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1971 add mod1 = Meta_L
1972 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1973 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1974 EOF
1975
1976 *** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1977 Emacs built with Motif.
1978
1979 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1980 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1981
1982 *** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
1983
1984 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1985 rights, containing this text:
1986
1987 --------------------------------
1988 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1989 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1990 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1991 EOF
1992
1993 xmodmap - << EOF
1994 clear mod1
1995 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1996 add mod1 = Meta_L
1997 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1998 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1999 EOF
2000 --------------------------------
2001
2002 *** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
2003
2004 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
2005
2006 ** AIX
2007
2008 *** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
2009
2010 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2011 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2012
2013 *** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
2014
2015 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
2016
2017 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
2018 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
2019
2020 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
2021
2022 *** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
2023 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
2024 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
2025 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
2026
2027 *** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
2028
2029 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
2030 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
2031 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
2032 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
2033
2034 *** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
2035 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
2036
2037 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
2038 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
2039 Definitions" to make them defined.
2040
2041 ** Solaris
2042
2043 We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
2044 section on legacy systems.
2045
2046 *** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2047
2048 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2049 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2050
2051 *** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2052
2053 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2054 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2055 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2056 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2057
2058 *** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
2059
2060 We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
2061 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
2062 makes the problem stop:
2063
2064 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
2065 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
2066 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
2067 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
2068
2069 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
2070 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
2071
2072 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
2073 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
2074 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
2075
2076 *** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
2077
2078 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
2079 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
2080
2081 *** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
2082 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
2083
2084 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
2085
2086 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
2087
2088 *** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
2089 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
2090
2091 You can fix this by editing the file:
2092
2093 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
2094
2095 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
2096
2097 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2098
2099 that should read:
2100
2101 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2102
2103 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
2104
2105 ** Irix
2106
2107 *** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
2108
2109 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
2110
2111 *** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
2112
2113 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2114 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2115 to allocate ptys reliably.
2116
2117 * Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
2118
2119 ** Windows 95 and networking.
2120
2121 To support server sockets, Emacs 22.1 loads ws2_32.dll. If this file
2122 is missing, all Emacs networking features are disabled.
2123
2124 Old versions of Windows 95 may not have the required DLL. To use
2125 Emacs' networking features on Windows 95, you must install the
2126 "Windows Socket 2" update available from MicroSoft's support Web.
2127
2128 ** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
2129
2130 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
2131 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
2132 problem.
2133
2134 ** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 22.1
2135
2136 Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameter
2137 with a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems.
2138 Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control over
2139 which font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character,
2140 use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset.
2141
2142 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
2143 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
2144 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
2145 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
2146 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
2147 pop-up menu interaction.
2148
2149 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
2150 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
2151
2152 When "ClearType" method is selected as the "method to smooth edges of
2153 screen fonts" (in Display Properties, Appearance tab, under
2154 "Effects"), there are various problems related to display of
2155 characters: 2-pixel trace is left behind when moving overlays, bold
2156 fonts can be hard to read, small portions of some characters could
2157 appear chopped, etc. This happens because, under ClearType,
2158 characters are drawn outside their advertised bounding box. Emacs 21
2159 disabled the use of ClearType, whereas Emacs 22 allows it and has some
2160 code to enlarge the width of the bounding box. Apparently, this
2161 display feature needs more changes to get it 100% right. A workaround
2162 is to disable ClearType.
2163
2164 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
2165 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
2166 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
2167 after moving back into it.
2168
2169 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
2170 not as severely as in 21.1.
2171
2172 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
2173 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
2174
2175 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. However, some
2176 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
2177 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
2178 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make these
2179 input methods work with Emacs, set the keyboard coding system to the
2180 appropriate value after you activate the Windows input method. For
2181 example, if you activate the Hebrew input method, type this:
2182
2183 C-x RET k hebrew-iso-8bit RET
2184
2185 (Emacs ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up
2186 the appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do
2187 that yet.) In addition, to use these Windows input methods, you
2188 should set your "Language for non-Unicode programs" (on Windows XP,
2189 this is on the Advanced tab of Regional Settings) to the language of
2190 the input method.
2191
2192 To bind keys that produce non-ASCII characters with modifiers, you
2193 must specify raw byte codes. For instance, if you want to bind
2194 META-a-grave to a command, you need to specify this in your `~/.emacs':
2195
2196 (global-set-key [?\M-\340] ...)
2197
2198 The above example is for the Latin-1 environment where the byte code
2199 of the encoded a-grave is 340 octal. For other environments, use the
2200 encoding appropriate to that environment.
2201
2202 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
2203 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
2204 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
2205 library function.
2206
2207 The function set-time-zone-rule gives incorrect results for many
2208 non-US timezones. This is due to over-simplistic handling of
2209 daylight savings switchovers by the Windows libraries.
2210
2211 Files larger than 4GB cause overflow in the size (represented as a
2212 32-bit integer) reported by `file-attributes'. This affects Dired as
2213 well, since the Windows port uses a Lisp emulation of `ls' that relies
2214 on `file-attributes'.
2215
2216 Sound playing is not supported with the `:data DATA' key-value pair.
2217 You _must_ use the `:file FILE' method.
2218
2219 ** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
2220
2221 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
2222 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
2223 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
2224 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
2225 or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
2226
2227 ** Cygwin build of Emacs hangs after rebasing Cygwin DLLs
2228
2229 Usually, on Cygwin, one needs to rebase the DLLs if an application
2230 aborts with a message like this:
2231
2232 C:\cygwin\bin\python.exe: *** unable to remap C:\cygwin\bin\cygssl.dll to
2233 same address as parent(0xDF0000) != 0xE00000
2234
2235 However, since Cygwin DLL 1.5.17 was released, after such rebasing,
2236 Emacs hangs.
2237
2238 This was reported to happen for Emacs 21.2 and also for the pretest of
2239 Emacs 22.1 on Cygwin.
2240
2241 To work around this, build Emacs like this:
2242
2243 LDFLAGS='-Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base' ./configure
2244 make LD='$(CC)'
2245 make LD='$(CC)' install
2246
2247 This produces an Emacs binary that is independent of rebasing.
2248
2249 Note that you _must_ use LD='$(CC)' in the last two commands above, to
2250 prevent GCC from passing the "--image-base 0x20000000" option to the
2251 linker, which is what it does by default. That option produces an
2252 Emacs binary with the base address 0x20000000, which will cause Emacs
2253 to hang after Cygwin DLLs are rebased.
2254
2255 ** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
2256
2257 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
2258 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
2259 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
2260 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
2261 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
2262
2263 ** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2264
2265 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
2266 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
2267 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
2268 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
2269 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
2270 confuses ange-ftp.
2271
2272 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2273 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2274 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2275 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2276 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2277 client's executable. For example:
2278
2279 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
2280
2281 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2282 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
2283
2284 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
2285
2286 ** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
2287
2288 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2289 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
2290
2291 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2292 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2293 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2294 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2295 has):
2296
2297 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2298 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2299 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2300 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
2301
2302 ** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2303
2304 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2305 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2306 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2307 work when an antivirus package is installed.
2308
2309 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2310 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2311 or disable it entirely.
2312
2313 ** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
2314
2315 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2316 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2317 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2318 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2319 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2320 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2321 generic mouse driver might help.
2322
2323 ** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
2324
2325 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2326 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2327 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2328 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
2329
2330 ** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2331 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2332 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2333 seen.
2334
2335 ** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2336 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
2337
2338 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
2339
2340 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2341 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2342 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2343 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2344 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2345 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
2346
2347 ** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
2348
2349 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2350 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2351 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2352 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
2353
2354 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2355 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2356 problem lies in the X-server settings.
2357
2358 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2359 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2360 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2361 selection".
2362
2363 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2364 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2365 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2366 here.
2367
2368 * Build-time problems
2369
2370 ** Configuration
2371
2372 *** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
2373
2374 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2375 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2376 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
2377
2378 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2379 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2380 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2381 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2382 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2383 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
2384
2385 *** `configure' warns ``accepted by the compiler, rejected by the preprocessor''.
2386
2387 This indicates a mismatch between the C compiler and preprocessor that
2388 configure is using. For example, on Solaris 10 trying to use
2389 CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc (the Sun Studio compiler) together with
2390 CPP=/usr/ccs/lib/cpp can result in errors of this form (you may also
2391 see the error ``"/usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h", line 500: undefined control'').
2392
2393 The solution is to tell configure to use the correct C preprocessor
2394 for your C compiler (CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E" in the above
2395 example).
2396
2397 *** `configure' fails with ``"junk.c", line 660: invalid input token: 8.elc''
2398
2399 The final stage of the Emacs configure process uses the C preprocessor
2400 to generate the Makefiles. Errors of this form can occur if the C
2401 preprocessor inserts extra whitespace into its output. The solution
2402 is to find the switches that stop your preprocessor from inserting extra
2403 whitespace, add them to CPPFLAGS, and re-run configure. For example,
2404 this error can occur on Solaris 10 when using the Sun Studio compiler
2405 ``Sun C 5.8'' with its preprocessor CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E".
2406 The relevant switch in this case is "-Xs" (``compile assuming
2407 (pre-ANSI) K & R C style code'').
2408
2409 ** Compilation
2410
2411 *** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
2412
2413 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
2414 (Red Hat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
2415 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2416 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2417 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2418 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2419 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2420 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
2421
2422 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2423 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2424 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2425 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
2426
2427 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2428 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2429 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2430 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2431 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2432 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2433 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2434 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2435 `/etc/auto.home'.
2436
2437 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2438 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2439 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2440 to work around the problem.
2441
2442 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2443 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2444 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2445 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
2446
2447 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
2448
2449 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
2450
2451 *** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
2452
2453 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2454 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2455 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2456 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2457 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2458 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2459 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2460 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2461 variables).
2462
2463 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2464 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2465 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2466 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2467 run the script like this:
2468
2469 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
2470
2471 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2472 the script).
2473
2474 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2475 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
2476
2477 *** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2478 *** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2479
2480 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2481 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2482 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2483 configure script.
2484
2485 *** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2486
2487 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2488 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2489 Emacs's configure script.
2490
2491 *** Building a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit GNU/Linux architecture.
2492
2493 First ensure that the necessary 32-bit system libraries and include
2494 files are installed. Then use:
2495
2496 env CC="gcc -m32" ./configure --build=i386-linux-gnu \
2497 --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
2498
2499 (using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system).
2500
2501 *** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC versions
2502
2503 Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
2504 reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time. In
2505 addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
2506 info. Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
2507 compiling Emacs. GCC versions 4.0.3, 4.0.4, 4.1.1, and 4.1.2
2508 reportedly build a working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend
2509 these GCC versions. Note that these versions of GCC, 4.0.3, 4.0.4,
2510 4.1.1, and 4.1.2, are currently the _only_ versions known to succeed
2511 in building Emacs (as of v22.1).
2512
2513 *** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
2514
2515 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2516 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2517 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2518 __MSVCRT__, like so:
2519
2520 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
2521
2522 *** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
2523
2524 Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2525 to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2526 fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
2527
2528 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
2529
2530 The error message might be something like this:
2531
2532 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
2533 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
2534 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
2535 '0xffffffff'
2536 Stop.
2537
2538 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
2539 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
2540 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
2541 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
2542 or EOL conversions.
2543
2544 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
2545 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
2546 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
2547 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
2548 mangling them.
2549
2550 *** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
2551
2552 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2553 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2554 patch to assert.h should solve this:
2555
2556 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2557 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2558 ***************
2559 *** 41,47 ****
2560 /*
2561 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2562 */
2563 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
2564
2565 #else /* debugging enabled */
2566
2567 --- 41,47 ----
2568 /*
2569 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2570 */
2571 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
2572
2573 #else /* debugging enabled */
2574
2575
2576 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Visual Studio 2005 fails.
2577
2578 Microsoft no longer ships the single threaded version of the C library
2579 with their compiler, and the multithreaded static library is missing
2580 some functions that Microsoft have deemed non-threadsafe. The
2581 dynamically linked C library has all the functions, but there is a
2582 conflict between the versions of malloc in the DLL and in Emacs, which
2583 is not resolvable due to the way Windows does dynamic linking.
2584
2585 We recommend the use of the MingW port of GCC for compiling Emacs, as
2586 not only does it not suffer these problems, but it is also Free
2587 software like Emacs.
2588
2589 ** Linking
2590
2591 *** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2592 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
2593
2594 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2595 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2596 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2597 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2598 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2599 link stage.
2600
2601 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
2602
2603 make CC=gcc
2604
2605 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2606 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
2607
2608 *** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
2609
2610 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2611 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2612 workaround/fix is:
2613
2614 cd /lib
2615 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2616 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2617
2618 *** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2619 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2620 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2621
2622 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2623 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2624 you build Emacs:
2625
2626 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2627 chmod 664 libIM.a
2628 ranlib libIM.a
2629
2630 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2631 Makefile).
2632
2633 *** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2634
2635 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2636
2637 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2638
2639 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2640
2641 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2642 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2643
2644 *** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2645
2646 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2647
2648 *** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
2649
2650 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2651 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2652 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2653 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2654 does not work with this version of ncurses.
2655
2656 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
2657
2658 ** Dumping
2659
2660 *** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
2661
2662 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Red Hat Fedora Core
2663 1 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
2664 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs tries
2665 to handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, these
2666 instructions can be useful.
2667 The work-around explained here is not enough on Fedora Core 4 (and possible
2668 newer). Read the next item.
2669
2670 Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
2671 x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
2672 workaround is known.
2673
2674 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
2675
2676 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2677
2678 It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
2679 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
2680 associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
2681
2682 echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2683
2684 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2685 execution of this command:
2686
2687 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2688
2689 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
2690 Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
2691 command when running temacs like this:
2692
2693 setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2694
2695
2696 *** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.
2697
2698 In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during
2699 `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel"
2700 item, Linux kernel shipped with Fedora Core 4 randomizes the virtual
2701 address space of a process. As the result dumping may fail even if
2702 you turn off exec-shield. In this case, use the -R option to the setarch
2703 command:
2704
2705 setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2706
2707 or
2708
2709 setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
2710
2711 *** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
2712
2713 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2714 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2715
2716 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2717 space available on the machine.
2718
2719 On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2720 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2721 for large blocks (many pages).
2722
2723 *** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2724 *** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2725 *** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2726 *** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
2727
2728 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2729 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2730 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2731
2732 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2733 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2734 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2735 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2736 when unpacking the shell archive.
2737
2738 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2739 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2740 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2741
2742 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2743 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2744
2745 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2746 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2747 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2748 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2749 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2750 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2751 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2752 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2753 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2754 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2755 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2756 and remake temacs.
2757 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2758
2759 *** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
2760
2761 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2762 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2763 space than was allocated.
2764
2765 This could be caused by
2766 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2767 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2768 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2769 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2770 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2771 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2772 deleting that file.
2773 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2774 (not from the directory you expected).
2775 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2776 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2777 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2778 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2779 the space required.
2780
2781 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2782 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2783
2784 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2785 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2786 problem.
2787
2788 *** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
2789
2790 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2791 C backtrace printed by GDB:
2792
2793 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2794 (gdb) where
2795 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2796 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2797 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2798 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
2799
2800 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2801 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2802 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2803 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2804 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2805 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2806 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2807 distribution:
2808
2809 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2810 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2811 know what's really going on here. */
2812 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2813 0x10000000. */
2814 #if defined __linux__
2815 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2816 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2817 #endif
2818 #endif
2819 #endif /* 0 */
2820
2821 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2822 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2823 should now succeed.
2824
2825 *** OpenBSD 4.0 macppc: Segfault during dumping.
2826
2827 The build aborts with signal 11 when the command `./temacs --batch
2828 --load loadup bootstrap' tries to load files.el. A workaround seems
2829 to be to reduce the level of compiler optimization used during the
2830 build (from -O2 to -O1). It is possible this is an OpenBSD
2831 GCC problem specific to the macppc architecture, possibly only
2832 occurring with older versions of GCC (e.g. 3.3.5).
2833
2834 *** openSUSE 10.3: Segfault in bcopy during dumping.
2835
2836 This is due to a bug in the bcopy implementation in openSUSE 10.3.
2837 It is/will be fixed in an openSUSE update.
2838
2839 ** Installation
2840
2841 *** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
2842
2843 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2844 supplies the `install-info' command.
2845
2846 *** Installing to a directory with spaces in the name fails.
2847
2848 For example, if you call configure with a directory-related option
2849 with spaces in the value, eg --enable-locallisppath='/path/with\ spaces'.
2850 Using directory paths with spaces is not supported at this time: you
2851 must re-configure without using spaces.
2852
2853 *** Installing to a directory with non-ASCII characters in the name fails.
2854
2855 Installation may fail, or the Emacs executable may not start
2856 correctly, if a directory name containing non-ASCII characters is used
2857 as a `configure' argument (e.g. `--prefix'). The problem can also
2858 occur if a non-ASCII directory is specified in the EMACSLOADPATH
2859 envvar.
2860
2861 *** On Solaris, use GNU Make when installing an out-of-tree build
2862
2863 The Emacs configuration process allows you to configure the
2864 build environment so that you can build emacs in a directory
2865 outside of the distribution tree. When installing Emacs from an
2866 out-of-tree build directory on Solaris, you may need to use GNU
2867 make. The make programs bundled with Solaris support the VPATH
2868 macro but use it differently from the way the VPATH macro is
2869 used by GNU make. The differences will cause the "make install"
2870 step to fail, leaving you with an incomplete emacs
2871 installation. GNU make is available in /usr/sfw/bin on Solaris
2872 10 and can be installed as /opt/sfw/bin/gmake from the Solaris 9
2873 Software Companion CDROM.
2874
2875 The problems due to the VPATH processing differences affect only
2876 out of tree builds so, if you are on a Solaris installation
2877 without GNU make, you can install Emacs completely by installing
2878 from a build environment using the original emacs distribution tree.
2879
2880 ** First execution
2881
2882 *** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
2883
2884 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2885 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2886 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2887 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
2888
2889 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
2890
2891 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2892 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
2893
2894 *** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2895
2896 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2897
2898 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2899 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2900 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2901 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2902
2903 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2904 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2905 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2906 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2907 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2908
2909 * Emacs 19 problems
2910
2911 ** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
2912
2913 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2914 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2915 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2916 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2917
2918 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2919
2920 * Runtime problems on legacy systems
2921
2922 This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2923 If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2924 it is unlikely you will see any of these.
2925
2926 ** Ancient operating systems
2927
2928 AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2929
2930 *** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2931
2932 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2933 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2934
2935 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2936 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2937 X11Dev... with smit.
2938
2939 (This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2940
2941 *** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2942
2943 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2944 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2945 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2946 treated as control characters.
2947
2948 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2949 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2950
2951 *** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2952
2953 Could not load program emacs
2954 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2955 Error was: Exec format error
2956
2957 or this one:
2958
2959 Could not load program .emacs
2960 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2961 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2962 Error was: Exec format error
2963
2964 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2965 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2966
2967 *** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
2968
2969 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
2970 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
2971
2972 *** ISC Unix
2973
2974 **** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2975
2976 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2977 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2978 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2979 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2980 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2981
2982 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2983 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2984
2985 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2986
2987 *** SunOS
2988
2989 SunOS 4.1.4 stopped shipping on Sep 30 1998.
2990
2991 **** SunOS: You get linker errors
2992 ld: Undefined symbol
2993 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
2994 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
2995
2996 **** Sun 4.0.x: M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2997
2998 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2999 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
3000
3001 **** SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3: Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
3002
3003 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
3004 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
3005 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
3006 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
3007 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
3008 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
3009 obtain the destination address.
3010
3011 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
3012 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
3013 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
3014 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
3015 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
3016 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
3017 of this writing, these official versions are available:
3018
3019 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
3020 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
3021 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
3022 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
3023 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
3024
3025 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
3026 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
3027
3028 **** Sunos 4: You get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
3029
3030 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
3031 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
3032 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
3033
3034 **** SunOS 4.1.3: Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
3035
3036 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
3037 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
3038 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
3039 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
3040
3041 **** Sunos 4.1.3: Emacs gets hung shortly after startup.
3042
3043 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
3044 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
3045
3046 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
3047 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
3048 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
3049 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
3050 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
3051
3052 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
3053 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
3054
3055 **** SunOS 4: Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
3056 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
3057
3058 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
3059
3060 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
3061 or link libXmu statically.
3062
3063 **** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
3064
3065 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
3066 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
3067 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
3068 communicating through pipes.
3069
3070 *** Apollo Domain
3071
3072 **** Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain.
3073
3074 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
3075
3076 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
3077
3078 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
3079 Here is how to make more of them.
3080
3081 % cd /dev
3082 % ls pty*
3083 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
3084 % /etc/crpty 8
3085 # creates eight new pty's
3086
3087 *** Irix
3088
3089 *** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
3090
3091 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
3092 as of 8 Dec 1998.
3093
3094 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
3095
3096 *** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
3097 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
3098
3099 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
3100
3101 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
3102 003082 August 11, 1998.
3103
3104 *** OPENSTEP
3105
3106 **** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
3107
3108 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
3109 following message:
3110
3111 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
3112
3113 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
3114 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
3115 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
3116
3117 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
3118 {
3119 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
3120 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
3121
3122 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
3123 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
3124
3125 *** Solaris 2.x
3126
3127 **** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
3128
3129 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
3130 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
3131 as GCC.
3132
3133 **** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
3134
3135 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
3136 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
3137 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
3138
3139 **** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
3140
3141 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
3142 version of Solaris that you are using.
3143
3144 **** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
3145
3146 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
3147 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
3148
3149 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
3150
3151 **** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
3152
3153 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
3154 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
3155 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
3156 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
3157 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
3158
3159 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
3160 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
3161 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
3162 for certain.
3163
3164 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
3165 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
3166 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
3167
3168 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
3169 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
3170
3171 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
3172 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
3173
3174 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
3175 Solaris 2.5.
3176
3177 **** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
3178 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
3179
3180 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
3181 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
3182
3183 #if ThreadedX
3184 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3185 #endif
3186
3187 to:
3188
3189 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
3190 #if ThreadedX
3191 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3192 #endif
3193 #endif
3194
3195 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
3196 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
3197 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
3198 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
3199 definition for your type of machine and system.
3200
3201 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
3202 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
3203 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
3204
3205 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
3206 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
3207 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
3208 patch.
3209
3210 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
3211 he changed
3212 #define ThreadedX YES
3213 to
3214 #define ThreadedX NO
3215 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
3216 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
3217 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
3218
3219 **** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
3220
3221 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
3222 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
3223 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
3224 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
3225 described in the Solaris FAQ
3226 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
3227 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
3228
3229 **** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
3230 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
3231 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
3232 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
3233 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
3234 and the default CFLAGS.
3235
3236 **** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
3237
3238 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
3239 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
3240 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
3241 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
3242 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
3243 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
3244 are currently recommended for your host.
3245
3246 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
3247 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
3248 105284-18 might fix it again.
3249
3250 **** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
3251
3252 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
3253 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
3254 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
3255 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
3256
3257 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
3258 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
3259 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
3260 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
3261 should do.
3262
3263 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
3264 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
3265 libraries.
3266
3267 *** HP/UX versions before 11.0
3268
3269 HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
3270 HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
3271
3272 **** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
3273
3274 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
3275 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
3276 does not happen.
3277
3278 *** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
3279
3280 See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
3281
3282 *** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
3283
3284 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
3285 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
3286 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
3287 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
3288 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
3289 install them and rebuild Emacs.
3290
3291 *** Ultrix and Digital Unix
3292
3293 **** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
3294
3295 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
3296 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
3297 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
3298 hand.
3299
3300 **** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
3301
3302 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
3303 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
3304 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
3305 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
3306 in Emacs.
3307
3308 **** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
3309
3310 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
3311 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
3312 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
3313 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
3314
3315 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
3316 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
3317
3318 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
3319 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
3320 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
3321 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
3322
3323 *** SVr4
3324
3325 **** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
3326
3327 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
3328 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
3329 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
3330
3331 **** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
3332
3333 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
3334 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
3335 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
3336
3337 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
3338 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
3339 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
3340 configure script) that reads:
3341 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
3342 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
3343 the kernel bug.
3344
3345 *** Irix 5 and earlier
3346
3347 Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
3348 shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
3349
3350 **** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
3351
3352 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
3353 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
3354 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
3355 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
3356 syms.h.
3357
3358 **** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
3359
3360 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
3361 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
3362 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
3363 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
3364 command `swap -l'.
3365
3366 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
3367 line like this:
3368
3369 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
3370
3371 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
3372 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
3373 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
3374 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
3375 information.
3376
3377 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
3378 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
3379 on the network that can log on to the host.
3380
3381 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
3382 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
3383 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
3384 icons.
3385
3386 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
3387 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
3388 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
3389 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
3390
3391 **** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
3392
3393 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
3394 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
3395
3396 **** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
3397
3398 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
3399 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
3400 find that string, and take out the spaces.
3401
3402 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
3403
3404 *** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3405
3406 **** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3407
3408 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3409 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3410 fonts, so it does not work.
3411
3412 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3413 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3414 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3415 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3416 resources affect Emacs also:
3417
3418 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3419 *Background: scoBackground
3420 *Foreground: scoForeground
3421
3422 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3423 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3424
3425 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3426 Emacs*Background: white
3427 Emacs*Foreground: black
3428
3429 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3430 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3431 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3432 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3433 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3434 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3435 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3436 Open Desktop display.
3437
3438 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3439 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3440
3441 **** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3442
3443 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3444 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3445 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3446 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3447 GCC.
3448
3449 **** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3450
3451 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3452 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3453 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3454 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3455 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3456 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3457
3458 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3459 But you have to be root to do it.
3460
3461 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3462
3463 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3464 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3465 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3466 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3467 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3468
3469 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3470 These changes take effect when you reboot.
3471
3472 *** Linux 1.x
3473
3474 **** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
3475
3476 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3477 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3478 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
3479
3480 **** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3481 truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
3482
3483 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
3484 1.3.75.
3485
3486 ** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3487
3488 *** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3489
3490 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3491 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3492
3493 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3494 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3495 with the user.
3496
3497 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3498 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3499 communicate with the subprocess.
3500
3501 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3502 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3503 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3504 stdin.
3505
3506 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3507
3508 For Perl 4:
3509
3510 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3511 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3512 ***************
3513 *** 68,74 ****
3514 $rcfile=".perldb";
3515 }
3516 else {
3517 ! $console = "con";
3518 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3519 }
3520
3521 --- 68,74 ----
3522 $rcfile=".perldb";
3523 }
3524 else {
3525 ! $console = "";
3526 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3527 }
3528
3529
3530 For Perl 5:
3531 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3532 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3533 ***************
3534 *** 22,28 ****
3535 $rcfile=".perldb";
3536 }
3537 elsif (-e "con") {
3538 ! $console = "con";
3539 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3540 }
3541 else {
3542 --- 22,28 ----
3543 $rcfile=".perldb";
3544 }
3545 elsif (-e "con") {
3546 ! $console = "";
3547 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3548 }
3549 else {
3550
3551 *** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3552
3553 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3554 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3555
3556 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3557
3558 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3559 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3560 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3561 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3562
3563 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3564
3565 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3566 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3567 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3568 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3569 PATH.
3570
3571 ** MS-DOS
3572
3573 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
3574
3575 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3576 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3577 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3578 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3579 the front of your PATH environment variable.
3580
3581 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3582 like make-docfile.
3583
3584 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3585 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3586 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
3587 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
3588
3589 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
3590
3591 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
3592
3593 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3594 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3595 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3596 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3597 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3598 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3599 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3600 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3601 your system works as before.
3602
3603 *** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
3604
3605 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3606 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3607 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3608 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3609 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
3610
3611 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3612 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3613 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3614 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
3615
3616 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3617 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3618 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3619 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3620 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
3621
3622 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3623 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3624 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
3625
3626 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3627 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3628 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
3629
3630 *** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
3631
3632 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
3633
3634 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3635 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3636 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
3637
3638 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3639 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3640 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3641 incorrect library functions.
3642
3643 *** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3644 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
3645
3646 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3647 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3648 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3649 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
3650
3651 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3652 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3653 Lisp.
3654
3655 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3656 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3657 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3658 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3659 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3660 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
3661 explains this issue in more detail.
3662
3663 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3664 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3665 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3666 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3667 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3668 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3669 properly truncated.
3670
3671 ** Archaic window managers and toolkits
3672
3673 *** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
3674
3675 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3676 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3677 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3678 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3679 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
3680
3681 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
3682
3683 **** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
3684
3685 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3686 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
3687
3688 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
3689
3690 ** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
3691
3692 *** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
3693
3694 This shell command should fix it:
3695
3696 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
3697
3698 *** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3699 as a concentrator.
3700
3701 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
3702 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
3703
3704 * Build problems on legacy systems
3705
3706 ** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
3707
3708 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3709 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3710 such as bash.
3711
3712 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3713 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
3714
3715 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3716 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
3717
3718 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
3719
3720 This problem manifests itself as an error message
3721
3722 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
3723
3724 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3725 were built for an older system version,
3726
3727 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
3728
3729 made the problem go away.
3730
3731 ** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
3732
3733 If you get errors such as
3734
3735 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3736 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3737 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
3738
3739 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3740 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3741 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3742 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3743 ones available when you build Emacs.
3744
3745 ** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
3746
3747 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
3748
3749 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
3750
3751 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
3752
3753 ** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
3754
3755 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3756 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3757 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
3758
3759 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3760 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
3761
3762 ** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
3763
3764 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3765 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3766 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3767 with a floating point option other than the default.
3768
3769 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3770 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3771 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3772 floating point option: -fsoft.
3773
3774 ** SunOS: Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose.
3775
3776 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
3777 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
3778 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
3779 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
3780 toolkit.)
3781
3782 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
3783 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
3784 X11R4, then use it in the link.
3785
3786 ** SunOS4, DGUX 5.4.2: --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
3787
3788 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
3789 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
3790 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
3791 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
3792 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
3793 and Solaris in version 19.29.
3794
3795 ** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3796
3797 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3798
3799 ** VMS: Compilation errors on VMS.
3800
3801 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
3802 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
3803 This is not an error. Ignore it.
3804
3805 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
3806 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
3807
3808 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
3809 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
3810 char c = -1, d = 1;
3811 int i;
3812
3813 i = d ? c : d;
3814 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
3815 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
3816 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
3817
3818 ** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3819
3820 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3821
3822 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3823 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3824
3825 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3826 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3827 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3828 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3829 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3830 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3831 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3832
3833 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3834 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3835 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3836 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3837 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3838 Lisp_Object *args;
3839 ...
3840 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3841 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3842 Lisp_Object *args;
3843 Lisp_Object tem;
3844 ...
3845 tem = args[i];
3846 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3847 causes the problem to go away.
3848 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3849 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3850
3851 ** 68000 C compiler problems
3852
3853 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3854 These are some that have been observed.
3855
3856 *** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3857 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3858 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3859
3860 *** "cannot reclaim" error.
3861
3862 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3863 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3864 simpler expressions.
3865
3866 *** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3867
3868 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3869 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3870
3871 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3872
3873 lose (arg)
3874 struct foo arg;
3875 {
3876 test ((int *) arg.y);
3877 }
3878
3879 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3880 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3881 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3882
3883 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3884 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3885
3886 *** C compilers lose on returning unions.
3887
3888 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3889 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3890 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3891
3892 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3893 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3894
3895 \f
3896 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
3897
3898 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
3899 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
3900 the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
3901 any later version.
3902
3903 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
3904 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
3905 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
3906 GNU General Public License for more details.
3907
3908 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
3909 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
3910 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
3911 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
3912
3913 \f
3914 Local variables:
3915 mode: outline
3916 paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3917 end:
3918
3919 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a