1 GNU Emacs Installation Guide for the DJGPP (a.k.a. MS-DOS) port
3 Copyright (C) 1992, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004,
4 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
5 See the end of the file for license conditions.
7 The DJGPP port of GNU Emacs builds and runs on plain DOS and also on
8 all versions of MS-Windows from version 3.X on, including Windows XP
11 To build and install the DJGPP port, you need to have the DJGPP ports
12 of GCC (the GNU C compiler), GNU Make, rm, mv, and sed. See the
13 remarks in CONFIG.BAT for more information about locations and
14 versions. The Emacs FAQ (see info/efaq) includes pointers to Internet
15 sites where you can find the necessary utilities; search for "MS-DOS".
16 The configuration step (see below) will test for these utilities and
17 will refuse to continue if any of them isn't found.
19 Bootstrapping Emacs or recompiling Lisp files in the `lisp'
20 subdirectory using the various targets in the lisp/Makefile file
21 requires additional utilities: `find' (from Findutils), GNU `echo' and
22 `test' (from Sh-utils), `ls' and `chmod' (from Fileutils), `grep'
23 (from Grep), and a port of Bash. However, you should not normally
24 need to run lisp/Makefile, as all the Lisp files are distributed in
25 byte-compiled form as well. As for bootstrapping, you will only need
26 that if you check-out development sources from the Emacs source
29 If you are building the DJGPP version of Emacs on a DOS-like system
30 which supports long file names (e.g. Windows 9X or Windows XP), you
31 need to make sure that long file names are handled consistently both
32 when you unpack the distribution and compile it. If you intend to
33 compile with DJGPP v2.0 or later, and long file names support is
34 enabled (LFN=y in the environment), you need to unpack Emacs
35 distribution in a way that doesn't truncate the original long
36 filenames to the DOS 8.3 namespace; the easiest way to do this is to
37 use djtar program which comes with DJGPP, since it will note the LFN
38 setting and behave accordingly. You can build Emacs with LFN=n, if
39 some of your tools don't support long file names: just ensure that LFN
40 is set to `n' during both unpacking and compiling.
42 (By the time you read this, you have already unpacked the Emacs
43 distribution, but if the explanations above imply that you should have
44 done it differently, it's safer to delete the directory tree created
45 by the unpacking program and unpack Emacs again, than to risk running
46 into problems during the build process.)
48 It is important to understand that the runtime support of long file
49 names by the Emacs binary is NOT affected by the LFN setting during
50 compilation; Emacs compiled with DJGPP v2.0 or later will always
51 support long file names on Windows no matter what was the setting
52 of LFN at compile time. However, if you compiled with LFN disabled
53 and want to enable LFN support after Emacs was already built, you need
54 to make sure that the support files in the lisp, etc and info
55 directories are called by their original long names as found in the
56 distribution. You can do this either by renaming the files manually,
57 or by extracting them from the original distribution archive with
58 djtar after you set LFN=y in the environment.
60 To unpack Emacs with djtar, type this command:
64 (This assumes that the Emacs distribution is called `emacs.tgz' on
67 If you want to print international characters, install the intlfonts
68 distribution. For this, create a directory called `fonts' under the
69 Emacs top-level directory (usually called `emacs-XX.YY') created by
70 unpacking emacs.tgz, chdir into the directory emacs-XX.YY/fonts, and
73 djtar -x intlfonts.tgz
75 When unpacking Emacs is done, a directory called `emacs-XX.YY' will be
76 created, where XX.YY is the Emacs version. To build and install
77 Emacs, chdir to that directory and type these commands:
82 Running "config msdos" checks for several programs that are required
83 to configure and build Emacs; if one of those programs is not found,
84 CONFIG.BAT stops and prints an error message. If you have DJGPP
85 version 2.0 or 2.01, it will complain about a program called
86 DJECHO.EXE. These old versions of DJGPP shipped that program under
87 the name ECHO.EXE, so you can simply copy ECHO.EXE to DJECHO.EXE and
88 rerun CONFIG.BAT. If you have neither ECHO.EXE nor DJECHO.EXE, you
89 should be able to find them in your djdevNNN.zip archive (where NNN is
90 the DJGPP version number).
92 On Windows NT, Windows 2000/XP/Vista, running "config msdos" might
93 print an error message like "VDM has been already loaded". This is
94 because those systems have a program called `redir.exe' which is
95 incompatible with a program by the same name supplied with DJGPP,
96 which is used by config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin'
97 subdirectory to the front of your PATH environment variable.
99 To install the international fonts, chdir to the intlfonts-X.Y
100 directory created when you unpacked the intlfonts distribution (X.Y is
101 the version number of the fonts' distribution), and type the following
104 make bdf INSTALLDIR=..
106 After Make finishes, you may remove the directory intlfonts-X.Y; the
107 fonts are installed into the fonts/bdf subdirectory of the top-level
108 Emacs directory, and that is where Emacs will look for them by
111 Building Emacs creates executable files in the src and lib-src
112 directories. Installing the DJGPP port of Emacs moves these
113 executables to a sibling directory called bin. For example, if you
114 build in directory C:/emacs, installing moves the executables from
115 C:/emacs/src and C:/emacs/lib-src to the directory C:/emacs/bin, so
116 you can then delete the subdirectories C:/emacs/src and
117 C:/emacs/lib-src if you wish. The only subdirectories you need to
118 keep are bin, lisp, etc and info. (If you installed intlfonts, keep
119 the fonts directory and all its subdirectories as well.) The bin
120 subdirectory should be added to your PATH. The msdos subdirectory
121 includes a PIF and an icon file for Emacs which you might find useful
122 if you run Emacs under MS Windows.
124 Emacs on MSDOS finds the lisp, etc and info directories by looking in
125 ../lisp, ../etc and ../info, starting from the directory where the
126 Emacs executable was run from. You can override this by setting the
127 environment variables EMACSDATA (for the location of `etc' directory),
128 EMACSLOADPATH (for the location of `lisp' directory) and INFOPATH (for
129 the location of the `info' directory).
131 Emacs features which require asynchronous subprocesses that depend on
132 multitasking do not work in the DJGPP port. Synchronous subprocesses
133 do work, so features such as compilation and grep run synchronously,
134 unlike opn other platforms.
136 Version 2.0 of djgpp has two bugs that affect Emacs. We've included
137 corrected versions of two files from djgpp in the msdos subdirectory:
138 is_exec.c and sigaction.c. To work around the bugs, compile these
139 files and link them into temacs. Djgpp versions 2.01 and later have
140 these bugs fixed, so upgrade if you can before building Emacs.
143 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
145 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
146 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
147 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
148 (at your option) any later version.
150 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
151 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
152 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
153 GNU General Public License for more details.
155 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
156 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.