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1 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
3
4 * Segfault on GNU/Linux using certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
5
6 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Redhat Fedora Core
7 1), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
8 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper.
9
10 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
11
12 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
13
14 It returns 1 or 2 when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
15 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
16 associated commands.
17
18 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
19 execution of this command:
20
21 temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
22
23 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
24 Exec-shield while building Emacs, using the `setarch' command like
25 this:
26
27 setarch i386 ./configure <configure parameters>
28 setarch i386 make <make parameters>
29
30 * Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
31
32 This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
33 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
34 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
35 the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
36 fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
37 Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
38 and then start the application again.
39 If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
40 application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
41 of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
42 sufficient to recompile Qt.
43
44 * Process output truncated on Mac OS X (Carbon) when using pty's.
45
46 There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
47 Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
48 leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
49
50 * Emacs crashes on Mac OS X (Carbon) after system software upgrade.
51
52 This problem seems to be now solved by Steven Tamm's patch to
53 unexmacosx.c on Nov 24, 2002.
54
55 Between Mac OS X release 10.2.1 and 10.2.2 there was an incompatible
56 change in the memory allocator that causes a EXC_BAD_ACCESS error near
57 xrealloc(). Relinking the application (by deleting src/temacs and
58 running make) will solve the problem. It appears to be caused by some
59 problems with the unexec code and its interaction with libSystem.B.
60
61 * Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass
62
63 It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
64
65 This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
66 the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
67 flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
68 necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
69
70 On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
71 configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
72
73 * Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
74
75 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
76 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
77 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
78 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
79 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
80 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
81 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
82 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
83 include in the fontset spec:
84
85 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
86 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
87 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
88
89 * The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
90
91 Emacs by default only supports the parts of the Unicode BMP whose code
92 points are in the ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff. This excludes: most
93 of CJK, Yi and Hangul, as well as everything outside the BMP.
94
95 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
96 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
97 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
98 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
99 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
100 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
101 information.
102
103 To edit such UTF data, turn on Utf-Translate-Cjk mode, which makes
104 many common CJK characters available for encoding and decoding and can
105 be extended by updating the tables it uses. This also allows you to
106 save as UTF buffers containing characters decoded by the chinese-,
107 japanese- and korean- coding systems, e.g. cut and pasted from
108 elsewhere.
109
110 * Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
111
112 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
113 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
114 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
115 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
116
117 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
118 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
119
120 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
121 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
122 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
123
124 * Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X) running on Solaris 7 or 8.
125
126 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
127 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
128
129 * Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
130
131 Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
132 library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
133 following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
134 though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
135 distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
136
137 --- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
138 +++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
139 @@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
140
141 (mapcar
142 (lambda (x)
143 - (mapcar
144 - (lambda (y)
145 - (mucs-define-coding-system
146 - (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
147 - (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
148 - (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
149 - (cdr x)))
150 + (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
151 + ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
152 + ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
153 + ;; system definitions.
154 + (let ((y (cadr x)))
155 + (mucs-define-coding-system
156 + (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
157 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
158 + (mapcar
159 + (lambda (y)
160 + (mucs-define-coding-system
161 + (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
162 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
163 + (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
164 + (cdr x)))
165 `((utf-8
166 (utf-8-unix
167 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
168
169 Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
170 Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
171
172 * Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
173
174 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
175 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
176 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
177 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
178 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
179 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
180 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
181 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
182 variables).
183
184 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
185 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
186 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
187 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
188 run the script like this:
189
190 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
191
192 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
193 the script).
194
195 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
196 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
197
198 * Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
199 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
200
201 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
202 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
203 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
204 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
205 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
206 link stage.
207
208 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
209
210 make CC=gcc
211
212 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
213 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
214
215 * Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
216
217 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
218 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
219 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
220 __MSVCRT__, like so:
221
222 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
223
224 * Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
225
226 The error message might be something like this:
227
228 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
229 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
230 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
231 '0xffffffff'
232 Stop.
233
234 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
235 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
236 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
237 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
238 or EOL conversions.
239
240 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
241 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
242 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
243 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
244 mangling them.
245
246 * Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
247
248 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
249 C backtrace printed by GDB:
250
251 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
252 (gdb) where
253 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
254 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
255 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
256 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
257
258 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
259 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
260 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
261 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
262 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
263 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
264 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
265 distribution:
266
267 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
268 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
269 know what's really going on here. */
270 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
271 0x10000000. */
272 #if defined __linux__
273 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
274 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
275 #endif
276 #endif
277 #endif /* 0 */
278
279 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
280 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
281 should now succeed.
282
283 * JPEG images aren't displayed.
284
285 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
286 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
287 correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
288 against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
289
290 * Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
291
292 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
293 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
294 patch to assert.h should solve this:
295
296 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
297 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
298 ***************
299 *** 41,47 ****
300 /*
301 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
302 */
303 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
304
305 #else /* debugging enabled */
306
307 --- 41,47 ----
308 /*
309 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
310 */
311 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
312
313 #else /* debugging enabled */
314
315
316
317 * Improving performance with slow X connections
318
319 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
320 be carried out at the same time:
321
322 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
323 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
324 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
325 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
326 package.
327
328 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
329 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
330
331 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
332 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
333
334 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
335 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
336 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
337 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
338 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
339 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate
340 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
341 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
342 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
343 For more about lbxproxy, see:
344 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
345
346 * Getting a Meta key on the FreeBSD console
347
348 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
349 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
350 current keymap to a file with the command
351
352 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
353
354 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
355 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
356 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
357 to look like this
358
359 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
360
361 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
362
363 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
364
365 * Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
366
367 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
368 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
369 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
370 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
371 been filed.
372
373 * Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font
374
375 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
376 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
377 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
378 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
379
380 A workaround for this is to add something like
381
382 emacs.waitForWM: false
383
384 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
385 frame's parameter list, like this:
386
387 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
388
389 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
390
391 * Underlines appear at the wrong position.
392
393 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
394 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
395 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
396 problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
397 `.emacs'.
398
399 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
400 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
401 property.
402
403 * When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
404 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
405 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
406 problem disappears.
407
408 * There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
409 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
410 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
411 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
412 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
413 used with neXtaw at run time.
414
415 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
416 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
417 built Emacs with.
418
419 * Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
420
421 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
422 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
423 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
424
425 * Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
426
427 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
428 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
429 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
430 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
431 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
432
433 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
434 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
435 terminfo when built.
436
437 * Error messages about undefined colors on X.
438
439 The messages might say something like this:
440
441 Unable to load color "grey95"
442
443 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
444
445 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
446
447 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
448 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
449 resources to load all the colors it needs.
450
451 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
452
453 * Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
454
455 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
456 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
457 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
458 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
459 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
460 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
461 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
462 "colors".
463
464 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
465 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
466 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
467 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
468 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
469 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
470 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
471 capability).
472
473 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
474 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
475 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
476 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
477
478 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
479 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
480 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
481 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
482 emulator.
483
484 Beginning with version 21.4, Emacs supports the --color command-line
485 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
486 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
487 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
488
489 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
490 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
491 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
492 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
493 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
494 `global-font-lock-mode'.
495
496 * Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
497
498 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
499 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
500 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
501 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
502 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
503 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
504 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
505 always blinks.
506
507 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
508 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
509 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
510 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
511 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
512 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
513
514 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
515 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
516 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
517 produce a modified terminfo entry.
518
519 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
520 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
521
522 * Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
523
524 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
525 emulation for which it is set up.
526
527 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
528 Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
529 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
530 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
531 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
532 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
533 menu placement.
534
535 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
536 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
537 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
538 developers.
539
540 * Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.2.
541
542 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
543 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
544 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
545 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
546 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
547 pop-up menu interaction.
548
549 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
550 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
551
552 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
553 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
554 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
555 after moving back into it.
556
557 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
558 not as severely as in 21.1.
559
560 Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
561 characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
562
563 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
564 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
565
566 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.2). Some
567 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
568 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
569 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
570 work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
571 you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
572 the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
573 ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
574 appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
575 yet.)
576
577 Windows uses UTF-16 encoding to deal with multilingual text (text not
578 encodable in the `system codepage') in the clipboard. To deal with
579 this, load the library `utf-16' and use `set-selection-coding-system'
580 to set the clipboard coding system to `utf-16-le-with-signature-dos'.
581
582 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
583 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
584 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
585 library function.
586
587 * The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
588
589 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
590 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
591 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
592
593 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
594 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
595 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
596 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
597 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
598 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
599
600 * Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
601
602 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
603 (RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
604 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
605 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
606 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
607 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
608 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
609 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
610
611 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
612 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
613 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
614 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
615
616 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
617 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
618 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
619 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
620 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
621 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
622 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
623 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
624 `/etc/auto.home'.
625
626 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
627 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
628 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
629 to work around the problem.
630
631 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
632 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
633 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
634 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
635
636 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
637
638 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
639
640 * Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
641
642 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
643 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
644 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
645 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
646
647 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
648
649 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
650 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
651
652 * Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
653
654 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
655 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
656 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
657 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
658 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
659 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
660
661 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
662
663 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
664
665 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
666 problem.
667
668 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
669 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
670 `xset fp rehash'.
671
672 * Large file support is disabled on HP-UX. See the comments in
673 src/s/hpux10.h.
674
675 * Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
676 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
677 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
678 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
679 older version.
680
681 * Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
682
683 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
684 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
685 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
686 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
687 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
688 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
689 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
690 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
691 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
692 to the end of a very large buffer.
693
694 Beginning with version 21.4, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
695 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
696 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
697 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
698
699 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
700 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
701 fontification by setting the variable
702 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
703 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
704
705 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
706 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
707
708 * When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
709 or messed up.
710
711 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
712 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
713 background.
714
715 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
716 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
717 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
718 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
719 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
720
721 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
722 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
723 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
724 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
725 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
726 present or commented out:
727
728 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
729 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
730 Emacs*Foreground
731 Emacs*Background
732
733 * Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
734
735 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
736 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
737 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
738 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
739 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
740
741 * Dired is very slow.
742
743 This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
744 time. Possible reasons for this include:
745
746 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
747 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
748
749 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
750
751 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
752
753 To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
754 `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
755 invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
756 (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
757
758 * Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
759
760 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
761 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
762 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
763 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
764 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
765 confuses ange-ftp.
766
767 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
768 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
769 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
770 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
771 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
772 client's executable. For example:
773
774 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
775
776 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
777 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
778
779 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
780
781 * Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
782 under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
783
784 * On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
785 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
786 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
787 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
788
789 * Compiling on AIX 4.3.x or 4.4 fails.
790
791 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
792 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
793 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
794 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
795
796 * Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
797 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
798 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
799
800 * PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
801
802 PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
803 as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
804 of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
805 sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
806 HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
807 (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
808 (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
809
810 * The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
811
812 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
813 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
814 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
815 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
816
817 * The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
818
819 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
820 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
821 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
822 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
823 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
824
825 * Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
826
827 The error message might be something like this:
828
829 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
830
831 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
832 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
833 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
834 corrects that.
835
836 * ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
837
838 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
839 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
840 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
841
842 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
843
844 * lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
845
846 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
847 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
848
849 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
850 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
851 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
852 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
853 has):
854
855 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
856 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
857 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
858 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
859
860 * On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
861 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
862 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
863 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
864 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
865
866 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
867 process invokes Emacs several times.
868
869 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
870 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
871 can be found.
872
873 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
874 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
875 specified run-time search path in the executable.
876
877 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
878 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
879 backtraces like this:
880
881 (dbx) where
882 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]
883 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
884 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
885 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
886 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
887 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
888 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
889 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
890 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
891
892 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
893 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
894 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
895 to work around the problem.
896
897 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
898
899 * On Solaris 2.7, building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
900 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
901 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
902 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
903 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
904 and the default CFLAGS.
905
906 * Compiling syntax.c with the OPENSTEP 4.2 compiler gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
907
908 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
909 following message:
910
911 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
912
913 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
914 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
915 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
916
917 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
918 {
919 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
920 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
921
922 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
923 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
924
925 * Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
926
927 A typical error message might be something like
928
929 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
930
931 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
932 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
933 are:
934
935 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
936
937 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
938 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
939 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
940
941 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
942 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
943 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
944
945 * Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
946
947 The typical error message might be like this:
948
949 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
950
951 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
952 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
953 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
954 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
955 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
956 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
957 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
958
959 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
960 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
961
962 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
963 file.
964
965 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
966 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
967 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
968
969 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
970
971 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
972 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
973 load-path.
974
975 * Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
976
977 An example of such an error is:
978
979 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
980
981 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
982 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
983 present in load-path:
984
985 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
986
987 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
988 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
989 load-path.
990
991 * Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
992
993 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
994 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
995 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
996 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
997 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
998 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
999
1000 update-alternatives --config ftp
1001
1002 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
1003
1004 * Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
1005
1006 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
1007 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
1008 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
1009 work when an antivirus package is installed.
1010
1011 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
1012 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
1013 or disable it entirely.
1014
1015 * On MS-Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
1016
1017 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
1018 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
1019 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
1020 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
1021
1022 * MS-Windows 95/98/ME crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
1023
1024 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
1025 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
1026 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
1027 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
1028 PATH.
1029
1030 * Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
1031
1032 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
1033 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
1034 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
1035 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
1036 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
1037 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
1038 generic mouse driver might help.
1039
1040 * Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
1041
1042 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
1043 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
1044 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
1045 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
1046
1047 * Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
1048 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
1049 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
1050 seen.
1051
1052 * After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working.
1053
1054 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1055 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1056 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1057 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1058 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1059 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1060 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1061
1062 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1063 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1064 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1065 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1066 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1067 modifier:
1068
1069 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1070
1071 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1072 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1073
1074 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1075
1076 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1077 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1078 keys can serve as Meta.
1079
1080 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1081 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1082
1083 * On OSF/Dec Unix/Tru64/<whatever it is this year> under X locally or
1084 remotely, M-SPC acts as a `compose' key with strange results. See
1085 keyboard(5).
1086
1087 Changing Alt_L to Meta_L fixes it:
1088 % xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L'
1089 % xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R'
1090
1091 * Error "conflicting types for `initstate'" compiling with GCC on Irix 6.
1092
1093 Install GCC 2.95 or a newer version, and this problem should go away.
1094 It is possible that this problem results from upgrading the operating
1095 system without reinstalling GCC; so you could also try reinstalling
1096 the same version of GCC, and telling us whether that fixes the problem.
1097
1098 * Emacs dumps core on Solaris in function IMCheckWindow.
1099
1100 This was reported to happen when Emacs runs with more than one frame,
1101 and one of them is closed, either with "C-x 5 0" or from the window
1102 manager.
1103
1104 This bug was reported to Sun as
1105
1106 Gtk apps dump core in ximlocal.so.2:IMCheckIMWindow()
1107 Bug Reports: 4463537
1108
1109 Installing Solaris 8 patch 108773-12 for Sparc and 108774-12 for x86
1110 reportedly fixes the bug, which appears to be inside the shared
1111 library xiiimp.so.
1112
1113 Alternatively, you can configure Emacs with `--with-xim=no' to prevent
1114 the core dump, but will loose X input method support, of course. (You
1115 can use Emacs's own input methods instead, if you install Leim.)
1116
1117 * On Solaris 7, Emacs gets a segmentation fault when starting up using X.
1118
1119 This results from Sun patch 107058-01 (SunOS 5.7: Patch for
1120 assembler) if you use GCC version 2.7 or later.
1121 To work around it, either install patch 106950-03 or later,
1122 or uninstall patch 107058-01, or install the GNU Binutils.
1123 Then recompile Emacs, and it should work.
1124
1125 * With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
1126
1127 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
1128
1129 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
1130 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
1131 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
1132 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
1133 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
1134 /******************************************************************
1135
1136 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
1137 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
1138 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
1139 XLCd lcd;
1140 {
1141 - char* begin;
1142 - char* end;
1143 + char* begin = NULL;
1144 + char* end = NULL;
1145 char* ret;
1146 int i = 0;
1147 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
1148 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
1149 }
1150 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
1151 if (ret != NULL) {
1152 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
1153 + if (begin != NULL) {
1154 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
1155 + } else {
1156 + ret[0] = '\0';
1157 + }
1158 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
1159 }
1160 return ret;
1161
1162
1163 * Emacs crashes on Irix 6.5 on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
1164
1165 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
1166
1167 * Emacs crashes in utmpname on Irix 5.3.
1168
1169 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
1170 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
1171
1172 * The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1173
1174 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1175 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1176 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1177 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1178 purposes.
1179
1180 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1181 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1182
1183 * On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
1184 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
1185
1186 You can fix this by editing the file:
1187
1188 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
1189
1190 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
1191
1192 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1193
1194 that should read:
1195
1196 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1197
1198 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
1199
1200 * Emacs on Digital Unix 4.0 fails to build, giving error message
1201 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
1202
1203 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
1204 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
1205
1206 * Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
1207
1208 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
1209 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
1210 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
1211
1212 * Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1213
1214 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1215 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1216 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1217 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1218 change this.
1219
1220 * When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
1221
1222 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
1223 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
1224 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
1225 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
1226 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
1227
1228 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
1229 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
1230
1231 * Failure in unexec while dumping emacs on Digital Unix 4.0
1232
1233 This problem manifests itself as an error message
1234
1235 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
1236
1237 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
1238 were built for an older system version,
1239
1240 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
1241
1242 made the problem go away.
1243
1244 * No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
1245
1246 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
1247 as of 8 Dec 1998.
1248
1249 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
1250
1251 * As of version 20.4, Emacs doesn't work properly if configured for
1252 the Motif toolkit and linked against the free LessTif library. The
1253 next Emacs release is expected to work with LessTif.
1254
1255 * Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1256
1257 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1258 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1259 likely to cause it.
1260
1261 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1262
1263 * Emacs makes HPUX 11.0 crash.
1264
1265 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1266
1267 * Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine (HPUX 10.20).
1268
1269 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
1270
1271 * The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
1272 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
1273 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
1274 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
1275
1276 * Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
1277 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
1278 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
1279 earlier versions.
1280
1281 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
1282 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
1283 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
1284 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
1285 (cond
1286 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
1287 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
1288 + (insert-file-contents entity)
1289 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
1290 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
1291 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
1292
1293 * Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUC TeX installed.
1294
1295 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUC TeX; upgrading should solve
1296 these problems.
1297
1298 * No colors in AUC TeX with Emacs 21.
1299
1300 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
1301 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
1302
1303 * Running TeX from AUC TeX package with Emacs 20.3 gives a Lisp error
1304 about a read-only tex output buffer.
1305
1306 This problem appeared for AUC TeX version 9.9j and some earlier
1307 versions. Here is a patch for the file tex-buf.el in the AUC TeX
1308 package.
1309
1310 diff -c auctex/tex-buf.el~ auctex/tex-buf.el
1311 *** auctex/tex-buf.el~ Wed Jul 29 18:35:32 1998
1312 --- auctex/tex-buf.el Sat Sep 5 15:20:38 1998
1313 ***************
1314 *** 545,551 ****
1315 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1316 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1317 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1318 ! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer)
1319 (set-buffer buffer)
1320 (if dir (cd dir))
1321 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1322 - --- 545,552 ----
1323 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1324 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1325 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1326 ! (let (temp-buffer-show-function temp-buffer-show-hook)
1327 ! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer))
1328 (set-buffer buffer)
1329 (if dir (cd dir))
1330 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1331
1332 * On Irix 6.3, substituting environment variables in file names
1333 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
1334
1335 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
1336
1337 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
1338 003082 August 11, 1998.
1339
1340 * After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1341
1342 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1343 (standard-display-european t)
1344 That should be changed to
1345 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1346
1347 * Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
1348
1349 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
1350 supplies the `install-info' command.
1351
1352 * Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key, on HPUX.
1353
1354 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1355 rights, containing this text:
1356
1357 --------------------------------
1358 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1359 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1360 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1361 EOF
1362
1363 xmodmap - << EOF
1364 clear mod1
1365 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1366 add mod1 = Meta_L
1367 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1368 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1369 EOF
1370 --------------------------------
1371
1372 * Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1373
1374 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1375 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1376 of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1377 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1378 while, Emacs will print a message:
1379
1380 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1381
1382 A workaround is to not use `klipper'.
1383
1384 * Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
1385 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
1386 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
1387
1388 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
1389 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
1390 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
1391
1392 * M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1393
1394 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1395 for character composition.
1396
1397 * Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
1398
1399 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
1400 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
1401 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
1402
1403 127.0.0.1 localhost
1404 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
1405
1406 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
1407
1408 * Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs on Digital Unix 4.0.
1409
1410 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
1411 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
1412 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
1413 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
1414 in Emacs.
1415
1416 * When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
1417
1418 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
1419 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
1420 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
1421 support for 8-bit characters.
1422
1423 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
1424 this at your shell's prompt:
1425
1426 ispell -vv
1427
1428 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
1429 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
1430 does not.
1431
1432 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
1433 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
1434 Then rebuild the speller.
1435
1436 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
1437 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
1438
1439 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
1440 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
1441 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
1442 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
1443 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
1444
1445 If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
1446 you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
1447 can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
1448 in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
1449
1450 * On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1451 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1452
1453 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1454 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1455 known to work.
1456
1457 * On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
1458 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
1459
1460 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
1461
1462 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
1463 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
1464 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
1465 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
1466 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
1467 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
1468
1469 * Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server
1470
1471 If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
1472 reported to prevent the crashes.
1473
1474 * Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect
1475
1476 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
1477 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
1478 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
1479 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
1480
1481 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
1482 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
1483 problem lies in the X-server settings.
1484
1485 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
1486 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
1487 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
1488 selection".
1489
1490 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
1491 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
1492 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
1493 here.
1494
1495 * On Solaris 2, Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
1496
1497 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
1498 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
1499 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
1500 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
1501 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
1502 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
1503 are currently recommended for your host.
1504
1505 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
1506 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
1507 105284-18 might fix it again.
1508
1509 * On Solaris 2.6 and 7, the Compose key does not work.
1510
1511 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
1512 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
1513 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
1514 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
1515
1516 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
1517 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
1518 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
1519 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
1520 should do.
1521
1522 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
1523 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
1524 libraries.
1525
1526 * Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1527
1528 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1529 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1530 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1531 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1532
1533 * Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
1534
1535 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
1536 either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
1537 calls for specifying this.
1538
1539 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
1540 mail-host-address to the value you want.
1541
1542 * Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs, on UnixWare 2.1
1543
1544 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
1545 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
1546 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
1547 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
1548 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
1549 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
1550
1551 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
1552 But you have to be root to do it.
1553
1554 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
1555
1556 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
1557 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
1558 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
1559 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
1560 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
1561
1562 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
1563 These changes take effect when you reboot.
1564
1565 * Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1566
1567 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1568 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1569 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1570 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1571
1572 Here's how to do this:
1573
1574 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1575
1576 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1577 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1578 to normal, do
1579
1580 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1581
1582 * Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
1583
1584 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
1585 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
1586 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
1587
1588 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
1589 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
1590 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
1591
1592 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
1593 display all the characters Emacs supports.
1594
1595 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
1596 missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
1597 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
1598 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
1599 of this character to display a space.
1600
1601 * Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
1602
1603 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
1604
1605 * Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
1606
1607 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
1608 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
1609 lines do not overlap.
1610
1611 * You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
1612 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
1613
1614 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
1615 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
1616 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
1617
1618 * In FreeBSD 2.1.5, useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1619 directories that have the +t bit.
1620
1621 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1622 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1623 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1624 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1625
1626 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1627 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1628
1629 * When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1630 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1631
1632 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1633
1634 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1635
1636 * Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
1637 appear on disk.
1638
1639 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
1640 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
1641 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
1642 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
1643 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
1644 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
1645
1646 * "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
1647
1648 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
1649 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
1650 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
1651 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
1652 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
1653 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
1654
1655 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
1656 them to two different keys.
1657
1658 * Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup, on AIX4.2.
1659
1660 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
1661 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
1662
1663 * movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
1664
1665 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
1666 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
1667 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
1668 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
1669 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
1670 old POP protocol.
1671
1672 * Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
1673
1674 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
1675 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
1676 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
1677 happens to exist on your X server).
1678
1679 * Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
1680
1681 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
1682 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
1683 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
1684
1685 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
1686 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
1687
1688 * Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on HPUX 9 after you delete a frame.
1689
1690 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
1691 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
1692 does not happen.
1693
1694 * Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1695
1696 We suspect that this is a similar bug in the X libraries provided by
1697 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1698 makes the problem stop:
1699
1700 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1701 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1702 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1703 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1704
1705 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1706 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1707
1708 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1709 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1710 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1711
1712 * Problems running Perl under Emacs on MS-Windows NT/95.
1713
1714 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
1715 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
1716
1717 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
1718 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
1719 with the user.
1720
1721 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
1722 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
1723 communicate with the subprocess.
1724
1725 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
1726 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
1727 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
1728 stdin.
1729
1730 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
1731
1732 For Perl 4:
1733
1734 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
1735 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
1736 ***************
1737 *** 68,74 ****
1738 $rcfile=".perldb";
1739 }
1740 else {
1741 ! $console = "con";
1742 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1743 }
1744
1745 --- 68,74 ----
1746 $rcfile=".perldb";
1747 }
1748 else {
1749 ! $console = "";
1750 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1751 }
1752
1753
1754 For Perl 5:
1755 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
1756 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
1757 ***************
1758 *** 22,28 ****
1759 $rcfile=".perldb";
1760 }
1761 elsif (-e "con") {
1762 ! $console = "con";
1763 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1764 }
1765 else {
1766 --- 22,28 ----
1767 $rcfile=".perldb";
1768 }
1769 elsif (-e "con") {
1770 ! $console = "";
1771 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1772 }
1773 else {
1774
1775 * Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs:
1776
1777 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
1778
1779 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
1780 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
1781 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
1782
1783 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
1784 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
1785 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
1786 incorrect library functions.
1787
1788 * When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
1789
1790 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
1791 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
1792 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
1793 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
1794 the front of your PATH environment variable.
1795
1796 * When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
1797 like make-docfile.
1798
1799 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
1800 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
1801 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
1802 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
1803
1804 * Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
1805 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
1806
1807 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
1808 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
1809 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
1810 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
1811
1812 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
1813 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
1814 Lisp.
1815
1816 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
1817 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
1818 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
1819 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
1820 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
1821 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
1822 explains this issue in more detail.
1823
1824 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
1825 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
1826 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
1827 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
1828 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
1829 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
1830 properly truncated.
1831
1832 * Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
1833
1834 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
1835
1836 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
1837 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
1838 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
1839 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
1840 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
1841 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
1842 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
1843 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
1844 your system works as before.
1845
1846 * On MS-Windows 95, Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
1847
1848 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
1849 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
1850
1851 * Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
1852
1853 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1854 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
1855 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
1856 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
1857 or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
1858
1859 * `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
1860
1861 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
1862 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
1863 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
1864 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
1865 does not work with this version of ncurses.
1866
1867 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
1868
1869 * Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
1870
1871 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
1872 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
1873 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
1874 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
1875 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
1876 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
1877
1878 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
1879 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
1880 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
1881 it constitutes a separate package.
1882
1883 * Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
1884
1885 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
1886 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
1887 as GCC.
1888
1889 * Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly truncated
1890 on GNU/Linux systems.
1891
1892 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
1893 1.3.75.
1894
1895 * Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1896
1897 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1898 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1899 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1900 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1901
1902 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1903
1904 * On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
1905
1906 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
1907 version of Solaris that you are using.
1908
1909 * Emacs dumps core on startup, on Solaris.
1910
1911 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
1912 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
1913 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
1914 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
1915 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
1916
1917 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
1918 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
1919 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
1920 for certain.
1921
1922 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
1923 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
1924 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
1925
1926 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
1927 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
1928
1929 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
1930 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1931
1932 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
1933 Solaris 2.5.
1934
1935 * Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called, on Solaris.
1936
1937 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
1938 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
1939 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
1940
1941 * "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes on HPUX, in
1942 Emacs built with Motif.
1943
1944 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1945 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1946
1947 * On Irix 6.0, make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi
1948
1949 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
1950 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
1951 find that string, and take out the spaces.
1952
1953 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
1954
1955 * "out of virtual swap space" on Irix 5.3
1956
1957 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
1958 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
1959 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
1960 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
1961 command `swap -l'.
1962
1963 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
1964 line like this:
1965
1966 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
1967
1968 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
1969 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
1970 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
1971 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
1972 information.
1973
1974 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
1975 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
1976 on the network that can log on to the host.
1977
1978 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
1979 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
1980 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
1981 icons.
1982
1983 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
1984 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
1985 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
1986 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
1987
1988 * With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
1989 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
1990
1991 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
1992 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
1993 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
1994
1995 * On SunOS 4.1.3, Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
1996
1997 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
1998 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
1999 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
2000 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
2001
2002 * On SunOS 4, Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
2003 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
2004
2005 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
2006
2007 * On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
2008 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
2009
2010 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
2011 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
2012 Definitions" to make them defined.
2013
2014 * On SunOS, you get linker errors
2015 ld: Undefined symbol
2016 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
2017 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
2018
2019 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
2020 or link libXmu statically.
2021
2022 * On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as
2023 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2024 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2025
2026 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2027 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2028 you build Emacs:
2029
2030 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2031 chmod 664 libIM.a
2032 ranlib libIM.a
2033
2034 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2035 Makefile).
2036
2037 * Unpredictable segmentation faults on Solaris 2.3 and 2.4.
2038
2039 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
2040 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
2041
2042 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
2043
2044 * Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for
2045 MS-Windows.
2046
2047 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
2048 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
2049 problem.
2050
2051 * Emacs crashes at startup on MSDOS.
2052
2053 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
2054 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
2055 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
2056 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
2057 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
2058
2059 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
2060 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
2061 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
2062 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
2063
2064 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
2065 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
2066 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
2067 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
2068 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
2069
2070 * A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
2071
2072 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
2073 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
2074
2075 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
2076
2077 * Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2078
2079 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2080 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2081 Emacs's configure script.
2082
2083 * Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2084
2085 This results from a bug in GNU Sed version 2.03. To solve the
2086 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2087 configure script.
2088
2089 * On Sunos 4.1.1, there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
2090
2091 If you get errors such as
2092
2093 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
2094 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
2095 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
2096
2097 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
2098 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
2099 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
2100 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
2101 ones available when you build Emacs.
2102
2103 * The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
2104 other non-English HP keyboards too).
2105
2106 This is because HPUX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
2107 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
2108 configures the X server.
2109
2110 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
2111 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
2112 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
2113 EOF
2114
2115 xmodmap - << EOF
2116 clear mod1
2117 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
2118 add mod1 = Meta_L
2119 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
2120 add mod2 = Mode_switch
2121 EOF
2122
2123 * The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
2124
2125 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
2126 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
2127 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
2128 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
2129 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
2130
2131 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
2132
2133 * Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
2134
2135 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
2136 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
2137
2138 * Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys.
2139
2140 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2141 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2142 to allocate ptys reliably.
2143
2144 * On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
2145
2146 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
2147 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
2148 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
2149 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
2150 syms.h.
2151
2152 * Slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
2153
2154 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
2155 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
2156
2157 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
2158 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
2159 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
2160 networked and non-networked machines.
2161
2162 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
2163
2164 ** Networked Case
2165
2166 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
2167 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
2168 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
2169
2170 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
2171
2172 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
2173 lines:
2174
2175 order hosts, bind
2176 multi on
2177
2178 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
2179 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
2180 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
2181 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
2182
2183 ** Non-Networked Case
2184
2185 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
2186 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
2187 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
2188 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
2189 file is not necessary with this approach.
2190
2191 * On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
2192 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
2193
2194 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
2195 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
2196
2197 #if ThreadedX
2198 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2199 #endif
2200
2201 to:
2202
2203 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
2204 #if ThreadedX
2205 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2206 #endif
2207 #endif
2208
2209 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
2210 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
2211 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
2212 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
2213 definition for your type of machine and system.
2214
2215 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
2216 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
2217 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
2218
2219 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
2220 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
2221 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
2222 patch.
2223
2224 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
2225 he changed
2226 #define ThreadedX YES
2227 to
2228 #define ThreadedX NO
2229 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
2230 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
2231 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
2232
2233 * With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
2234 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
2235
2236 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
2237 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
2238 another escape character in kermit. One user did
2239
2240 set escape-character 17
2241
2242 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
2243
2244 * The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
2245
2246 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
2247
2248 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
2249
2250 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
2251 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
2252 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
2253 the resource prevents the problem.
2254
2255 * Emacs gets hung shortly after startup, on Sunos 4.1.3.
2256
2257 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2258 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2259
2260 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2261 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2262 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2263 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2264 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2265
2266 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2267 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2268
2269 * Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
2270
2271 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
2272 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
2273 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
2274 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
2275 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
2276 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
2277 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
2278 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
2279 not to work.
2280
2281 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
2282 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
2283 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
2284 same directory where system header files are kept.
2285
2286 * On Solaris 2.x, GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported"
2287
2288 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2289 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2290 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2291 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2292 described in the Solaris FAQ
2293 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2294 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
2295
2296 * The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
2297
2298 This shell command should fix it:
2299
2300 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
2301
2302 * Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
2303
2304 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
2305 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
2306 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
2307 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
2308 GCC.
2309
2310 * On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2311
2312 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2313 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2314 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2315
2316 * You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
2317
2318 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
2319 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
2320 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
2321 the Files menu).
2322
2323 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
2324 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
2325 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
2326 workaround can be found.
2327
2328 * Unusable default font on SCO 3.2v4.
2329
2330 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
2331 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
2332 fonts, so it does not work.
2333
2334 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
2335 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
2336 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
2337 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
2338 resources affect Emacs also:
2339
2340 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
2341 *Background: scoBackground
2342 *Foreground: scoForeground
2343
2344 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
2345 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
2346
2347 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
2348 Emacs*Background: white
2349 Emacs*Foreground: black
2350
2351 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
2352 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
2353 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
2354 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
2355 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
2356 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
2357 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
2358 Open Desktop display.
2359
2360 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
2361 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
2362
2363 * rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
2364
2365 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
2366 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
2367
2368 * Emacs is slow using X11R5 on HP/UX.
2369
2370 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2371 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2372 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2373 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2374 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2375 install them and rebuild Emacs.
2376
2377 * Loading fonts is very slow.
2378
2379 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
2380 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
2381 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
2382 "fonts.scale".
2383
2384 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
2385 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
2386
2387 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
2388 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
2389 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
2390
2391 * On AIX 3.2.4, releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2392
2393 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2394 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2395 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2396 treated as control characters.
2397
2398 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2399 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2400
2401 * display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2402
2403 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2404 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2405 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2406 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2407 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2408
2409 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2410 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2411
2412 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2413
2414 * On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2415
2416 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2417 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2418
2419 * Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
2420 segmentation fault and core dump.
2421
2422 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
2423 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
2424
2425 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
2426
2427 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
2428 untar it :-).
2429
2430 * Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2431
2432 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2433
2434 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2435
2436 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2437
2438 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2439 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2440
2441 * Link failure on IBM AIX 1.3 ptf 0013.
2442
2443 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2444 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2445 workaround/fix is:
2446
2447 cd /lib
2448 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2449 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2450
2451 * Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose on a Sun.
2452
2453 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
2454 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
2455 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
2456 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
2457 toolkit.)
2458
2459 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
2460 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
2461 X11R4, then use it in the link.
2462
2463 * Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'
2464
2465 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2466 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2467 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2468 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2469
2470 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2471
2472 * In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
2473
2474 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
2475 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
2476 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
2477 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
2478
2479 if ($?EMACS) then
2480 if ($EMACS == "t") then
2481 unset edit
2482 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
2483 endif
2484 endif
2485
2486 * An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
2487 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
2488
2489 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
2490 emacs*Cursor: black
2491 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
2492 that isn't a color.)
2493
2494 The fix is to correct your X resources.
2495
2496 * Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1 using --with-x-toolkit.
2497
2498 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
2499 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
2500 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
2501
2502 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
2503 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
2504
2505 * Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
2506
2507 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
2508 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
2509 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
2510
2511 * src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2512
2513 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2514 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.
2515
2516 * Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
2517
2518 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
2519 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
2520 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
2521 font.
2522
2523 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
2524 your font path, like this:
2525
2526 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
2527
2528 * Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
2529
2530 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
2531
2532 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
2533
2534 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
2535 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
2536 want, rewrite the resource.
2537
2538 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
2539 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
2540 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
2541
2542 * --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
2543
2544 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
2545 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
2546 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
2547 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
2548 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
2549 and Solaris in version 19.29.
2550
2551 * `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2552
2553 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2554 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2555 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2556 hand.
2557
2558 * --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong on BSD/386.
2559
2560 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
2561 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
2562 such as bash.
2563
2564 * Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies, on Sunos 5.3.
2565
2566 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2567 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2568 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2569 communicating through pipes.
2570
2571 * Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2572
2573 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2574 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2575 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2576 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2577 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2578 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2579 obtain the destination address.
2580
2581 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2582 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2583 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
2584 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
2585 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2586 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2587 of this writing, these official versions are available:
2588
2589 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2590 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2591 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2592 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2593 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2594
2595 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2596 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2597
2598 * On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs:
2599
2600 Could not load program emacs
2601 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2602 Error was: Exec format error
2603
2604 or this one:
2605
2606 Could not load program .emacs
2607 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2608 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2609 Error was: Exec format error
2610
2611 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2612 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2613
2614 * On AIX, you get this compiler error message:
2615
2616 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2617 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2618
2619 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2620 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2621 X11Dev... with smit.
2622
2623 * You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
2624
2625 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
2626 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
2627 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
2628 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
2629
2630 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
2631
2632 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
2633
2634 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
2635 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
2636 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
2637
2638 * C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
2639
2640 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
2641 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
2642 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
2643
2644 * Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
2645
2646 These control the actions of Emacs.
2647 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
2648 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
2649 "load" will search.
2650
2651 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
2652 of them, then try again.
2653
2654 * After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2655
2656 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2657 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2658 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2659
2660 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2661 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2662 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2663 configure script) that reads:
2664 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2665 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2666 the kernel bug.
2667
2668 * Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
2669 directly with an X server.
2670
2671 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
2672 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
2673 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
2674 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
2675 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
2676 have made the key binding correctly.
2677
2678 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
2679 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
2680 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
2681 default.
2682
2683 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
2684
2685 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
2686 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
2687
2688 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
2689 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
2690 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
2691 modifier bit not otherwise used.
2692
2693 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
2694 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
2695 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
2696 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
2697
2698 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
2699 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
2700
2701 * `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'
2702
2703 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
2704 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
2705 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
2706 value is just ten seconds.
2707
2708 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
2709
2710 * `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2711
2712 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2713 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2714 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2715 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2716
2717 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2718 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2719
2720 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2721 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2722 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2723 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2724
2725 * On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2726
2727 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2728 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2729 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2730
2731 * Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2732
2733 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2734
2735 * Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
2736 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
2737 * Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
2738 * GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
2739
2740 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
2741 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
2742 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
2743 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
2744
2745 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
2746 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
2747
2748 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
2749 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
2750
2751 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
2752
2753 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
2754 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
2755 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
2756 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
2757 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
2758 be careful not to lose the others.
2759
2760 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
2761
2762 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
2763
2764 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
2765 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
2766 again to say this:
2767
2768 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
2769
2770 * On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
2771
2772 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
2773
2774 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
2775
2776 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
2777
2778 * Self documentation messages are garbled.
2779
2780 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
2781 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
2782 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
2783
2784 * Trouble using ptys on AIX.
2785
2786 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2787 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2788
2789 * Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
2790
2791 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
2792
2793 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
2794 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
2795 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
2796 but tty is giving it back 3.
2797
2798 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
2799 word:
2800
2801 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
2802
2803 should be changed to:
2804
2805 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
2806
2807 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
2808 and into .login.
2809
2810 * Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
2811
2812 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
2813
2814 * Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
2815 * `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
2816
2817 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
2818 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
2819 the environment.
2820
2821 * Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
2822
2823 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
2824 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
2825 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
2826 with a floating point option other than the default.
2827
2828 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
2829 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
2830 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
2831 floating point option: -fsoft.
2832
2833 * Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
2834
2835 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
2836 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
2837 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
2838
2839 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
2840 whether this problem is present on a given system.
2841
2842 * Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
2843 as a concentrator.
2844
2845 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
2846 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
2847
2848 * M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2849
2850 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2851 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2852
2853 * Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
2854 terminal type.
2855
2856 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
2857 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
2858 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
2859 emulates.
2860
2861 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
2862 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
2863 it only if it is undefined.
2864
2865 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
2866
2867 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
2868 happen in a non-login shell.
2869
2870 * X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
2871
2872 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
2873 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
2874 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
2875 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
2876
2877 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
2878 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
2879 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
2880
2881 The easy way to do this is to put
2882
2883 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
2884
2885 in your site-init.el file.
2886
2887 * Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2888
2889 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2890 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2891 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2892 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2893
2894 * Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
2895
2896 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2897
2898 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2899
2900 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2901 Here is how to make more of them.
2902
2903 % cd /dev
2904 % ls pty*
2905 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2906 % /etc/crpty 8
2907 # creates eight new pty's
2908
2909 * Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
2910
2911 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2912 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2913
2914 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2915 space available on the machine.
2916
2917 On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2918 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2919 for large blocks (many pages).
2920
2921 * test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
2922 * or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
2923 * or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2924 * or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs
2925
2926 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2927 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2928 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2929
2930 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2931 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2932 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2933 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2934 when unpacking the shell archive.
2935
2936 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2937 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2938 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2939
2940 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2941 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2942
2943 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2944 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2945 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2946 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2947 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2948 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2949 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2950 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2951 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2952 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2953 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2954 and remake temacs.
2955 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2956
2957 * temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
2958
2959 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2960 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2961 space than was allocated.
2962
2963 This could be caused by
2964 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2965 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2966 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2967 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2968 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2969 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2970 deleting that file.
2971 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2972 (not from the directory you expected).
2973 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2974 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2975 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2976 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2977 the space required.
2978
2979 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2980 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2981
2982 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2983 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2984 problem.
2985
2986 * Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
2987
2988 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
2989 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
2990 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
2991 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
2992
2993 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
2994 than the corresponding .el file.
2995
2996 * The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2997
2998 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2999
3000 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
3001 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
3002 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
3003 value in the man page for a.out (5).
3004
3005 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
3006 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
3007 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
3008 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
3009 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
3010
3011 * Compilation errors on VMS.
3012
3013 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
3014 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
3015 This is not an error. Ignore it.
3016
3017 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
3018 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
3019
3020 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
3021 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
3022 char c = -1, d = 1;
3023 int i;
3024
3025 i = d ? c : d;
3026 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
3027 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
3028 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
3029
3030 * rmail gets error getting new mail
3031
3032 rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
3033 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
3034 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
3035
3036 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
3037 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
3038 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
3039 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
3040 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
3041 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
3042 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
3043
3044 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
3045 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
3046 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
3047 `mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
3048
3049 chgrp mail movemail
3050 chmod 2755 movemail
3051
3052 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
3053 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
3054 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
3055 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
3056 make install.
3057
3058 chgrp mail movemail
3059 chmod 2755 movemail
3060
3061 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
3062 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
3063 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
3064 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
3065 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
3066 directory copy is ineffective.
3067
3068 * Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
3069
3070 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
3071 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
3072 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
3073 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
3074 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
3075 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
3076 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
3077 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
3078
3079 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
3080
3081 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
3082 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
3083 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
3084
3085 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
3086 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
3087 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
3088 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
3089 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
3090 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
3091
3092 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
3093 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
3094 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
3095 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
3096 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
3097 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
3098 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
3099 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
3100 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
3101
3102 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
3103 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
3104 codes. You might as well try it.
3105
3106 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
3107 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
3108 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
3109 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
3110 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
3111 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
3112 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
3113 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
3114
3115 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
3116 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
3117 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
3118 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
3119 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
3120 control handling.)
3121
3122 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
3123 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
3124 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
3125 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
3126 other control characters are already used by emacs.
3127
3128 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
3129 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
3130 order to continue.
3131
3132 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
3133 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
3134 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
3135 automatically. Here is an example:
3136
3137 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
3138
3139 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
3140 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
3141 manually.
3142
3143 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
3144 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
3145 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
3146 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
3147 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
3148 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
3149 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
3150 of inferior systems.
3151
3152 * Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
3153
3154 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
3155 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
3156 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
3157 that wants to use flow control.
3158
3159 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
3160 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
3161 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
3162
3163 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
3164 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
3165 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
3166
3167 * Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
3168
3169 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
3170 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
3171 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
3172 control on the local system.
3173
3174 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
3175 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
3176 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
3177 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
3178
3179 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
3180 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
3181 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
3182
3183 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
3184 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
3185 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
3186 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
3187
3188 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
3189
3190 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
3191 info.
3192
3193 * Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
3194
3195 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
3196 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
3197 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
3198
3199 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
3200 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
3201 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
3202 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
3203 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
3204 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
3205 There are several possibilities:
3206
3207 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
3208
3209 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
3210 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
3211
3212 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
3213 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
3214 by termcap.
3215
3216 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
3217 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
3218 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
3219 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
3220 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
3221 tested on many kinds of terminals.
3222
3223 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
3224
3225 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
3226 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
3227 for certain terminals.
3228
3229 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
3230 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
3231
3232 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
3233 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
3234
3235 * Output from Control-V is slow.
3236
3237 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
3238 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
3239 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
3240 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
3241 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
3242 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
3243
3244 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
3245 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
3246 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
3247 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
3248 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
3249 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
3250 time as the operations really take.
3251
3252 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
3253 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
3254 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
3255 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
3256 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
3257 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
3258 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
3259 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
3260 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
3261 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
3262
3263 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
3264 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
3265 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
3266 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
3267 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
3268 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
3269 `cm' string.
3270
3271 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
3272 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
3273 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
3274
3275 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
3276 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
3277
3278 * Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
3279
3280 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
3281
3282 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
3283 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
3284
3285 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
3286
3287 * You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
3288
3289 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
3290 after a day or two.
3291
3292 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
3293 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
3294 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
3295 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
3296 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
3297 to it.
3298
3299 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
3300 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
3301 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
3302 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
3303 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
3304 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
3305
3306 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
3307 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
3308 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
3309 You can probably access help-command via f1.
3310
3311 * Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
3312 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
3313 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
3314 causes it.
3315
3316 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
3317 call in the RFS server.
3318
3319 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
3320 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
3321 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
3322 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
3323
3324 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
3325
3326 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
3327 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
3328 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
3329 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
3330 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
3331 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
3332 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
3333
3334 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
3335
3336 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3337 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
3338 retrieving revision 1.2
3339 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3340 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
3341 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
3342 ***************
3343 *** 163,169 ****
3344 /*
3345 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3346 */
3347 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
3348 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3349 else
3350 {
3351 --- 166,172 ----
3352 /*
3353 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3354 */
3355 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
3356 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3357 else
3358 {
3359
3360 * Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3361
3362 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3363
3364 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3365 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3366
3367 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3368 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3369 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3370 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3371 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3372 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3373 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3374
3375 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3376 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3377 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3378 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3379 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3380 Lisp_Object *args;
3381 ...
3382 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3383 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3384 Lisp_Object *args;
3385 Lisp_Object tem;
3386 ...
3387 tem = args[i];
3388 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3389 causes the problem to go away.
3390 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3391 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3392
3393 * 68000 C compiler problems
3394
3395 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3396 These are some that have been observed.
3397
3398 ** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3399 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3400 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3401
3402 ** "cannot reclaim" error.
3403
3404 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3405 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3406 simpler expressions.
3407
3408 ** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3409
3410 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3411 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3412
3413 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3414
3415 lose (arg)
3416 struct foo arg;
3417 {
3418 test ((int *) arg.y);
3419 }
3420
3421 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3422 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3423 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3424
3425 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3426 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3427
3428 * C compilers lose on returning unions
3429
3430 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3431 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3432 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3433
3434 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3435 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3436
3437 \f
3438 Copyright 1987,88,89,93,94,95,96,97,98,1999,2001,2002
3439 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3440
3441 Copying and redistribution of this file with or without modification
3442 are permitted without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
3443
3444 Local variables:
3445 mode: outline
3446 paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3447 end:
3448
3449 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a