1 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
4 * Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
6 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
7 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
8 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
9 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
10 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
11 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
12 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
13 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
16 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
17 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
18 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
19 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
20 run the script like this:
22 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
24 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
27 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
28 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
30 * Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
31 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
33 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
34 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
35 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
36 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
37 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
40 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
44 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
45 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
47 * Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
49 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
50 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
51 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
54 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
56 * Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
58 The error message might be something like this:
60 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
61 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
62 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
66 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
67 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
68 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
69 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
72 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
73 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
74 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
75 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
78 * Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
80 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
81 C backtrace printed by GDB:
83 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
85 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
86 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
87 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
88 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
90 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
91 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
92 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
93 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
94 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
95 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
96 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
99 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
100 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
101 know what's really going on here. */
102 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
104 #if defined __linux__
105 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
106 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
111 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
112 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
115 * JPEG images aren't displayed.
117 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
118 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem.
120 * Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
122 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
123 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
124 patch to assert.h should solve this:
126 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
127 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
131 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
133 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
135 #else /* debugging enabled */
139 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
141 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
143 #else /* debugging enabled */
147 * Improving performance with slow X connections
149 If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
150 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by
151 configuring Emacs with option `--without-xim'. Configuring Emacs
152 without XIM does not affect the use of Emacs' own input methods, which
153 are part of the Leim package.
155 If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
156 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
158 * Getting a Meta key on the FreeBSD console
160 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
161 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
162 current keymap to a file with the command
164 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
166 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
167 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
168 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
171 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
173 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
175 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
177 * Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
179 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
180 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
181 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
182 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
185 * Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font
187 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
188 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
189 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
190 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
192 A workaround for this is to add something like
194 emacs.waitForWM: false
196 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
197 frame's parameter list, like this:
199 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
201 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
203 * Underlines appear at the wrong position.
205 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
206 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
207 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
208 problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
211 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
212 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
215 * When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
216 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
217 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
220 * There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
221 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
222 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
223 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
224 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
225 used with neXtaw at run time.
227 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
228 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
231 * Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
233 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
234 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
235 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
237 * Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
239 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
240 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
241 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
242 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
243 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
245 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
246 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
249 * Error messages about undefined colors on X.
251 The messages might say something like this:
253 Unable to load color "grey95"
255 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
257 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
259 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
260 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
261 resources to load all the colors it needs.
263 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
265 * Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
267 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
268 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
269 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
270 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
271 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
272 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
273 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
276 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
277 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
278 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
279 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
280 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
281 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
282 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
285 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
286 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
287 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
288 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
290 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
291 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
292 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
293 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
296 Beginning with version 21.3, Emacs supports the --color command-line
297 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
298 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
299 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
301 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
302 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
303 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
304 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
305 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
306 `global-font-lock-mode'.
308 * Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
310 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
311 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
312 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
313 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
314 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
315 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
316 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
319 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
320 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
321 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
322 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
323 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
324 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
326 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
327 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
328 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
329 produce a modified terminfo entry.
331 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
332 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
334 * Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
336 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
337 emulation for which it is set up.
339 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
340 Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
341 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
342 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
343 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
344 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
347 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
348 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
349 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
352 * Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.1.
354 Emacs 21.1 built for MS-Windows doesn't support images and the tool bar.
355 Support for these will be added in future versions.
357 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
358 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menu items is not
359 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
360 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
361 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
362 pop-up menu interaction.
364 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
365 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
366 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
367 after moving back into it.
369 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
370 not as severely as in 21.1.
372 Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
373 characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
375 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
376 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
378 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.1). Some
379 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
380 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
381 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
382 work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
383 you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
384 the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
385 ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
386 appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
389 Multilingual text put into the Windows clipboard by other Windows
390 applications cannot be safely pasted into Emacs (as of v21.1). This
391 is because Windows uses Unicode to represent multilingual text, but
392 Emacs does not yet support Unicode well enough to decode it. This
393 means that Emacs can only interchange non-ASCII text with other
394 Windows programs if the characters are in the system codepage.
395 Reportedly, a partial solution is to install the Mule-UCS package and
396 set selection-coding-system to utf-16-le-dos.
398 * The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
400 This can happen because the linker by default only looks for shared
401 libraries, but jpeg distribution by default doesn't build and doesn't
402 install a shared version of the library, `libjpeg.so'. One system
403 where this is known to happen is Compaq OSF/1 (`Tru64'), but it
404 probably isn't limited to that system.
406 You can configure the jpeg library with the `--enable-shared' option
407 and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a shared version of libjpeg,
408 which you need to install. Finally, rerun the Emacs configure script,
409 which should now find the jpeg library. Alternatively, modify the
410 generated src/Makefile to link the .a file explicitly.
412 (If you need the static version of the jpeg library as well, configure
413 libjpeg with both `--enable-static' and `--enable-shared' options.)
415 * Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
417 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
418 (RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
419 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
420 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
421 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
422 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
423 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
424 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
426 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
427 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
428 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
429 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
431 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
432 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
433 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
434 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
435 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
436 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
437 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
438 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
441 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
442 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
443 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
444 to work around the problem.
446 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
447 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
448 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
449 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
451 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
453 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
455 * Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
457 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
458 via NFS. Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
459 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
461 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
463 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
464 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
466 * Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
468 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
469 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
470 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
471 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
472 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
473 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
475 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
477 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
479 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
482 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
483 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
486 * Large file support is disabled on HP-UX. See the comments in
489 * Crashes when displaying uncompressed GIFs with version
490 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
492 * Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
494 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
495 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
496 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
497 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
498 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
499 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
500 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
501 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
502 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
503 to the end of a very large buffer.
505 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
506 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
507 fontification by setting the variable
508 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
509 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
511 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
512 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
514 * When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
517 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
518 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
521 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
522 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
523 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
524 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style.
526 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
527 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
528 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
529 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
530 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
531 present or commented out:
533 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
534 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
538 * Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
540 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
541 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
542 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
543 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
544 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
546 * Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
548 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
549 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
550 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
551 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
552 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
555 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
556 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
557 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
558 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
559 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
560 client's executable. For example:
562 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
564 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
565 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
567 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
570 * The latest released version of the W3 package doesn't run properly
571 with Emacs 21 and needs work. However, these problems are already
572 fixed in W3's CVS. The patch below is reported to make w3-4.0pre.46
575 Some users report they are unable to byte-compile W3 with Emacs 21.
576 If the patches below don't help to resolve your problems, install the
577 CVS version of W3, which should be compatible with Emacs 21.
579 diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el
580 --- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el Sun Nov 14 22:00:12 1999
581 +++ w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el Thu Dec 14 14:59:15 2000
583 (dispatch-event (next-command-event)))
586 - (if (and (not (sit-for 0)) (input-pending-p))
587 + ;; modified for GNU Emacs 21 by bob@rattlesnake.com on 2000 Dec 14
588 + (if (and (not (sit-for 0)) nil)
591 (setq w3-pause-keystroke
592 diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-e21.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-e21.el
593 --- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-e21.el Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970
594 +++ w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-e21.el Thu Dec 14 14:54:58 2000
596 +;;; w3-e21.el --- ** required for GNU Emacs 21 **
597 +;; Added by bob@rattlesnake.com on 2000 Dec 14
602 * On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
603 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
604 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
605 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
607 * Compiling on AIX 4.3.x or 4.4 fails.
609 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
610 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
611 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
612 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
614 * The PSGML package uses the obsolete variables
615 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
616 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
618 * The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
620 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
621 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
622 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
623 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
625 * Unicode characters are not unified with other Mule charsets.
627 As of v21.1, Emacs charsets are still not unified. This means that
628 characters which belong to charsets such as Latin-2, Greek, Hebrew,
629 etc. and the same characters in the `mule-unicode-*' charsets are
630 different characters, as far as Emacs is concerned. For example, text
631 which includes Unicode characters from the Latin-2 locale cannot be
632 encoded by Emacs with ISO 8859-2 coding system; and if you yank Greek
633 text from a buffer whose buffer-file-coding-system is greek-iso-8bit
634 into a mule-unicode-0100-24ff buffer, Emacs won't be able to save that
635 buffer neither as ISO 8859-7 nor as UTF-8.
637 To work around this, install some add-on package such as Mule-UCS.
639 * Problems when using Emacs with UTF-8 locales
641 Some systems, including recent versions of GNU/Linux, have terminals
642 or X11 subsystems that can be configured to provide Unicode/UTF-8
643 input and display. Normally, such a system sets environment variables
644 such as LANG, LC_CTYPE, or LC_ALL to a string which ends with a
645 `.UTF-8'. For example, a system like this in a French locale might
646 use `fr_FR.UTF-8' as the value of LANG.
648 Since Unicode support in Emacs, as of v21.1, is not yet complete (see
649 the previous entry in this file), UTF-8 support is not enabled by
650 default, even in UTF-8 locales. Thus, some Emacs features, such as
651 non-ASCII keyboard input, might appear to be broken in these locales.
652 To solve these problems, you need to turn on some options in your
653 `.emacs' file. Specifically, the following customizations should make
654 Emacs work correctly with UTF-8 input and text:
656 (setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
657 (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
658 (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
659 (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
660 (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
662 * The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
664 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
665 slots now. If the built-in Unicode/UTF-8 support is insufficient,
666 e.g. if you need more CJK coverage, use the current Mule-UCS package.
667 Any files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode won't be read
668 correctly by Emacs 21.
670 * Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
672 The error message might be something like this:
674 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
676 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
677 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
678 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
681 * ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
683 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
684 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
685 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
687 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
689 * On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
690 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
691 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
692 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
693 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
695 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
696 process invokes Emacs several times.
698 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
699 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
702 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
703 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
704 specified run-time search path in the executable.
706 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
707 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
708 backtraces like this:
711 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]
712 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
713 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
714 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
715 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
716 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
717 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
718 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
719 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
721 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
722 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
723 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
724 to work around the problem.
726 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
728 * On Solaris 2.7, building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
729 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
730 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
731 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
732 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
733 and the default CFLAGS.
735 * Compiling syntax.c with the OPENSTEP 4.2 compiler gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
737 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
740 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
742 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
743 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
744 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
746 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
748 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
749 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
751 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
752 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
754 * Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
756 A typical error message might be something like
758 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
760 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
761 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
764 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
766 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
767 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
768 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
770 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
771 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
772 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
774 * Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
776 The typical error message might be like this:
778 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
780 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
781 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
782 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
783 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
784 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
785 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
786 its loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
788 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
789 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
791 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
794 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
795 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
796 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
798 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
800 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
801 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
804 * Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
806 An example of such an error is:
808 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
810 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your classpath.
811 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
812 present in load-path:
814 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
816 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
817 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
820 * Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
822 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
823 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
824 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
825 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
826 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
827 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
829 update-alternatives --config ftp
831 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
833 * Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
835 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
836 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
837 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
838 work when an antivirus package is installed.
840 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
841 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
842 or disable it entirely.
844 * On Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
846 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
847 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
848 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
849 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
851 * Windows 95/98/ME crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
853 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
854 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
855 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
856 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
859 * Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
860 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
861 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
864 * After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working.
866 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
867 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
868 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
869 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
870 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
871 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
872 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
874 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
875 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
876 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
877 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
878 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
881 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
883 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
884 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
886 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
888 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
889 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
890 keys can serve as Meta.
892 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
893 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
895 * On OSF/Dec Unix/Tru64/<whatever it is this year> under X locally or
896 remotely, M-SPC acts as a `compose' key with strange results. See
899 Changing Alt_L to Meta_L fixes it:
900 % xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L'
901 % xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R'
903 * Error "conflicting types for `initstate'" compiling with GCC on Irix 6.
905 Install GCC 2.95 or a newer version, and this problem should go away.
906 It is possible that this problem results from upgrading the operating
907 system without reinstalling GCC; so you could also try reinstalling
908 the same version of GCC, and telling us whether that fixes the problem.
910 * Emacs dumps core on Solaris in function IMCheckWindow.
912 This was reported to happen when Emacs runs with more than one frame,
913 and one of them is closed, either with "C-x 5 0" or from the window
916 This bug was reported to Sun as
918 Gtk apps dump core in ximlocal.so.2:IMCheckIMWindow()
921 Installing Solaris 8 patch 108773-12 for Sparc and 108774-12 for x86
922 reportedly fixes the bug, which appears to be inside the shared
925 Alternatively, you can configure Emacs with `--with-xim=no' to prevent
926 the core dump, but will loose X input method support, of course. (You
927 can use Emacs's own input methods instead, if you install Leim.)
929 * On Solaris 7, Emacs gets a segmentation fault when starting up using X.
931 This results from Sun patch 107058-01 (SunOS 5.7: Patch for
932 assembler) if you use GCC version 2.7 or later.
933 To work around it, either install patch 106950-03 or later,
934 or uninstall patch 107058-01, or install the GNU Binutils.
935 Then recompile Emacs, and it should work.
937 * With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
939 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
941 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
942 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
944 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
945 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
946 /******************************************************************
948 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
955 + char* begin = NULL;
959 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
962 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
964 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
965 + if (begin != NULL) {
966 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
970 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
975 * Emacs crashes on Irix 6.5 on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
977 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
979 * Emacs crashes in utmpname on Irix 5.3.
981 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
982 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
984 * The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
986 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
987 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
988 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
989 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
992 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
993 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
995 * On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
996 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
998 You can fix this by editing the file:
1000 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
1002 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
1004 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1008 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1010 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
1012 * Emacs on Digital Unix 4.0 fails to build, giving error message
1013 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
1015 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
1016 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
1018 * Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
1020 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
1021 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
1022 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
1024 * Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1026 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1027 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1028 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1029 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1032 * When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
1034 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
1035 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
1036 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
1037 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
1038 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
1040 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
1041 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
1043 * Failure in unexec while dumping emacs on Digital Unix 4.0
1045 This problem manifests itself as an error message
1047 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
1049 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
1050 were built for an older system version,
1052 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
1054 made the problem go away.
1056 * No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
1058 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
1061 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
1063 * As of version 20.4, Emacs doesn't work properly if configured for
1064 the Motif toolkit and linked against the free LessTif library. The
1065 next Emacs release is expected to work with LessTif.
1067 * Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1069 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1070 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1073 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1075 * Emacs makes HPUX 11.0 crash.
1077 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1079 * Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine (HPUX 10.20).
1081 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
1083 * The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
1084 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
1085 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
1086 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
1088 * Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
1089 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
1090 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
1093 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
1094 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
1095 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
1096 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
1098 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
1099 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
1100 + (insert-file-contents entity)
1101 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
1102 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
1103 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
1105 * Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUC TeX installed.
1107 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUC TeX; upgrading should solve
1110 * No colors in AUC TeX with Emacs 21.
1112 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
1113 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
1115 * Running TeX from AUC TeX package with Emacs 20.3 gives a Lisp error
1116 about a read-only tex output buffer.
1118 This problem appeared for AUC TeX version 9.9j and some earlier
1119 versions. Here is a patch for the file tex-buf.el in the AUC TeX
1122 diff -c auctex/tex-buf.el~ auctex/tex-buf.el
1123 *** auctex/tex-buf.el~ Wed Jul 29 18:35:32 1998
1124 --- auctex/tex-buf.el Sat Sep 5 15:20:38 1998
1127 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1128 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1129 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1130 ! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer)
1133 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1135 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1136 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1137 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1138 ! (let (temp-buffer-show-function temp-buffer-show-hook)
1139 ! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer))
1142 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1144 * On Irix 6.3, substituting environment variables in file names
1145 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
1147 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
1149 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
1150 003082 August 11, 1998.
1152 * After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1154 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1155 (standard-display-european t)
1156 That should be changed to
1157 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1159 * Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
1161 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
1162 supplies the `install-info' command.
1164 * Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key, on HPUX.
1166 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1167 rights, containing this text:
1169 --------------------------------
1170 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1171 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1172 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1177 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1179 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1180 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1182 --------------------------------
1184 * Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1186 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1187 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1188 of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1189 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1190 while, Emacs will print a message:
1192 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1194 A workaround is to not use `klipper'.
1196 * Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
1197 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
1198 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
1200 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
1201 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
1202 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
1204 * M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1206 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1207 for character composition.
1209 * Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
1211 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
1212 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
1213 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
1216 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
1218 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
1220 * Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs on Digital Unix 4.0.
1222 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
1223 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
1224 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
1225 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
1228 * When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
1230 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
1231 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
1232 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
1233 support for 8-bit characters.
1235 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
1236 this at your shell's prompt:
1240 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
1241 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
1244 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
1245 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
1246 Then rebuild the speller.
1248 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
1249 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
1251 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
1252 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
1253 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
1254 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
1255 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
1257 * On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1258 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1260 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1261 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1264 * On Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
1265 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
1267 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
1269 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
1270 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
1271 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
1272 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
1273 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
1274 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
1276 * Under some Windows X-servers, Emacs' display is incorrect
1278 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
1279 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
1280 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
1281 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
1283 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions as
1284 well. The problem lies in the X-server settings.
1286 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
1287 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
1288 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
1291 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
1292 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
1293 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
1296 * On Solaris 2, Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
1298 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
1299 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
1300 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
1301 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
1302 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
1303 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
1304 are currently recommended for your host.
1306 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
1307 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
1308 105284-18 might fix it again.
1310 * On Solaris 2.6 and 7, the Compose key does not work.
1312 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
1313 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
1314 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
1315 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
1317 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
1318 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
1319 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
1320 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
1323 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
1324 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
1327 * Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
1329 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
1330 either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
1331 calls for specifying this.
1333 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
1334 mail-host-address to the value you want.
1336 * Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs, on UnixWare 2.1
1338 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
1339 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
1340 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
1341 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
1342 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
1343 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
1345 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
1346 But you have to be root to do it.
1348 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
1350 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
1351 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
1352 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
1353 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
1354 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
1356 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
1357 These changes take effect when you reboot.
1359 * Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1361 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1362 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1363 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1364 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1366 Here's how to do this:
1368 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1370 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1371 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1374 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1376 * Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
1378 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
1379 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
1380 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
1382 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
1383 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
1384 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
1386 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
1387 display all the characters Emacs supports.
1389 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
1390 missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
1391 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
1392 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
1393 of this character to display a space.
1395 * Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
1397 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
1399 * Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
1401 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
1402 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
1403 lines do not overlap.
1405 * You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
1406 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
1408 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
1409 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
1410 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
1412 * In FreeBSD 2.1.5, useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1413 directories that have the +t bit.
1415 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1416 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1417 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1418 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1420 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1421 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1423 * When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1424 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1426 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1428 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1430 * Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
1433 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
1434 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
1435 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
1436 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
1437 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
1438 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
1440 * "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
1442 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
1443 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
1444 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
1445 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
1446 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
1447 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
1449 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
1450 them to two different keys.
1452 * Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup, on AIX4.2.
1454 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
1455 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
1457 * movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
1459 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
1460 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
1461 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
1462 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
1463 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
1466 * Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
1468 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
1469 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
1470 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
1471 happens to exist on your X server).
1473 * Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
1475 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
1476 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
1477 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
1479 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
1480 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
1482 * Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on HPUX 9 after you delete a frame.
1484 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
1485 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
1488 * Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1490 We suspect that this is a similar bug in the X libraries provided by
1491 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1492 makes the problem stop:
1494 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1495 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1496 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1497 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1499 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1500 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1502 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1503 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1504 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1506 * Problems running Perl under Emacs on Windows NT/95.
1508 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
1509 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
1511 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
1512 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
1515 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
1516 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
1517 communicate with the subprocess.
1519 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
1520 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
1521 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
1524 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
1528 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
1529 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
1536 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1544 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1549 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
1550 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
1557 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1565 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1569 * Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs:
1571 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
1573 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
1574 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
1575 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
1577 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
1578 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
1579 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
1580 incorrect library functions.
1582 * When compiling with DJGPP on Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
1584 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
1585 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
1586 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
1587 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
1588 the front of your PATH environment variable.
1590 * When compiling with DJGPP on Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
1593 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
1594 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
1595 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
1596 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
1598 * Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
1599 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
1601 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
1602 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
1603 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
1604 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
1606 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
1607 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
1610 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
1611 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
1612 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
1613 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
1614 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
1615 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
1616 explains this issue in more detail.
1618 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
1619 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
1620 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
1621 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
1622 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
1623 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
1626 * Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
1628 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
1630 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
1631 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
1632 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
1633 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
1634 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
1635 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
1636 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
1637 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
1638 your system works as before.
1640 * On Windows 95, Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
1642 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
1643 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
1645 * Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on Windows.
1647 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1648 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
1649 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
1650 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
1651 or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
1653 * `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
1655 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
1656 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
1657 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
1658 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
1659 does not work with this version of ncurses.
1661 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
1663 * Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
1665 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
1666 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
1669 * Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly truncated
1670 on GNU/Linux systems.
1672 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
1675 * Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1677 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1678 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1679 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1680 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1682 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1684 * On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
1686 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
1687 version of Solaris that you are using.
1689 * Emacs dumps core on startup, on Solaris.
1691 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
1692 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
1693 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
1694 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
1695 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
1697 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
1698 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
1699 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
1702 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
1703 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
1704 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
1706 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
1707 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
1709 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
1710 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1712 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
1715 * Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called, on Solaris.
1717 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
1718 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
1719 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
1721 * "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes on HPUX, in
1722 Emacs built with Motif.
1724 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1725 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1727 * On Irix 6.0, make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi
1729 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
1730 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
1731 find that string, and take out the spaces.
1733 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
1735 * "out of virtual swap space" on Irix 5.3
1737 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
1738 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
1739 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
1740 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
1743 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
1746 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
1748 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
1749 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
1750 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
1751 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
1754 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
1755 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
1756 on the network that can log on to the host.
1758 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
1759 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
1760 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
1763 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
1764 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
1765 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
1766 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
1768 * With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
1769 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
1771 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
1772 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
1773 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
1775 * On SunOS 4.1.3, Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
1777 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
1778 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
1779 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
1780 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
1782 * On SunOS 4, Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
1783 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
1785 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
1787 * On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1788 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1790 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1791 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1792 Definitions" to make them defined.
1794 * On SunOS, you get linker errors
1795 ld: Undefined symbol
1796 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
1797 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
1799 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
1800 or link libXmu statically.
1802 * On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as
1803 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
1804 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
1806 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
1807 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
1810 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
1814 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
1817 * Unpredictable segmentation faults on Solaris 2.3 and 2.4.
1819 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
1820 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
1822 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
1824 * Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for
1827 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
1828 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
1831 * Emacs crashes at startup on MSDOS.
1833 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
1834 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
1835 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
1836 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
1837 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
1839 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
1840 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
1841 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
1842 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
1844 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
1845 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
1846 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
1847 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
1848 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
1850 * A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
1852 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
1853 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
1855 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
1857 * Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
1859 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
1860 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
1861 Emacs's configure script.
1863 * Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
1865 This results from a bug in GNU Sed version 2.03. To solve the
1866 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
1869 * On Sunos 4.1.1, there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
1871 If you get errors such as
1873 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1874 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1875 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
1877 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
1878 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
1879 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
1880 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
1881 ones available when you build Emacs.
1883 * The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1884 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1886 This is because HPUX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1887 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1888 configures the X server.
1890 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1891 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1892 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1897 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1899 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1900 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1903 * The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
1905 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
1906 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
1907 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
1908 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
1909 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
1911 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
1913 * Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1915 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1916 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1918 * Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys.
1920 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
1921 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
1922 to allocate ptys reliably.
1924 * On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
1926 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
1927 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
1928 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
1929 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
1932 * Slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1934 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1935 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1937 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1938 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1939 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1940 networked and non-networked machines.
1942 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1946 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1947 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1948 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1952 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1958 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1959 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1960 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1961 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1963 ** Non-Networked Case
1965 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1966 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1967 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1968 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1969 file is not necessary with this approach.
1971 * On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
1972 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
1974 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
1975 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
1978 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
1983 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
1985 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
1989 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
1990 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
1991 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
1992 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
1993 definition for your type of machine and system.
1995 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
1996 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
1997 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
1999 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
2000 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
2001 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
2004 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
2006 #define ThreadedX YES
2008 #define ThreadedX NO
2009 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
2010 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
2011 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
2013 * With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
2014 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
2016 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
2017 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
2018 another escape character in kermit. One user did
2020 set escape-character 17
2022 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
2024 * The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
2026 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
2028 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
2030 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
2031 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
2032 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
2033 the resource prevents the problem.
2035 * Emacs gets hung shortly after startup, on Sunos 4.1.3.
2037 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2038 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2040 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2041 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2042 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2043 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2044 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2046 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2047 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2049 * Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
2051 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
2052 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
2053 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
2054 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
2055 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
2056 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
2057 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
2058 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
2061 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
2062 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
2063 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
2064 same directory where system header files are kept.
2066 * On Solaris 2.x, GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported"
2068 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2069 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2070 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2071 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2072 described in the Solaris FAQ
2073 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2074 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
2076 * The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
2078 This shell command should fix it:
2080 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
2082 * Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
2084 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
2085 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
2086 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
2087 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
2090 * On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2092 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2093 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2094 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2096 * You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
2098 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
2099 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
2100 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
2103 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
2104 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
2105 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
2106 workaround can be found.
2108 * Unusable default font on SCO 3.2v4.
2110 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
2111 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
2112 fonts, so it does not work.
2114 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
2115 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
2116 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
2117 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
2118 resources affect Emacs also:
2120 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
2121 *Background: scoBackground
2122 *Foreground: scoForeground
2124 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
2125 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
2127 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
2128 Emacs*Background: white
2129 Emacs*Foreground: black
2131 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
2132 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
2133 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
2134 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
2135 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
2136 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
2137 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
2138 Open Desktop display.
2140 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
2141 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
2143 * rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
2145 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
2146 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
2148 * Emacs is slow using X11R5 on HP/UX.
2150 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2151 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2152 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2153 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2154 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2155 install them and rebuild Emacs.
2157 * Loading fonts is very slow.
2159 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
2160 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
2161 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
2164 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
2165 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
2167 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
2168 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
2169 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
2171 * On AIX 3.2.4, releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2173 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2174 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2175 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2176 treated as control characters.
2178 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2179 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2181 * display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2183 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2184 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2185 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2186 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2187 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2189 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2190 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2192 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2194 * On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2196 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2197 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2199 * Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
2200 segmentation fault and core dump.
2202 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
2203 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
2205 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
2207 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
2210 * Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2212 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2214 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2216 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2218 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2219 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2221 * Link failure on IBM AIX 1.3 ptf 0013.
2223 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2224 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2228 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2229 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2231 * Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose on a Sun.
2233 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
2234 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
2235 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
2236 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
2239 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
2240 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
2241 X11R4, then use it in the link.
2243 * Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'
2245 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2246 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2247 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2248 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2250 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2252 * In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
2254 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
2255 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
2256 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
2257 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
2260 if ($EMACS == "t") then
2262 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
2266 * An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
2267 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
2269 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
2271 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
2272 that isn't a color.)
2274 The fix is to correct your X resources.
2276 * Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1 using --with-x-toolkit.
2278 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
2279 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
2280 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
2282 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
2283 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
2285 * Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
2287 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
2288 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
2289 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
2291 * src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2293 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2294 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.
2296 * Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
2298 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
2299 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
2300 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
2303 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
2304 your font path, like this:
2306 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
2308 * Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
2310 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
2312 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
2314 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
2315 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
2316 want, rewrite the resource.
2318 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
2319 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
2320 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
2322 * --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
2324 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
2325 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
2326 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
2327 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
2328 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
2329 and Solaris in version 19.29.
2331 * `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2333 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2334 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2335 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2338 * --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong on BSD/386.
2340 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
2341 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
2344 * Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies, on Sunos 5.3.
2346 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2347 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2348 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2349 communicating through pipes.
2351 * Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2353 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2354 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2355 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2356 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2357 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2358 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2359 obtain the destination address.
2361 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2362 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2363 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
2364 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
2365 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2366 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2367 of this writing, these official versions are available:
2369 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2370 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2371 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2372 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2373 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2375 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2376 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2378 * On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs:
2380 Could not load program emacs
2381 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2382 Error was: Exec format error
2386 Could not load program .emacs
2387 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2388 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2389 Error was: Exec format error
2391 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2392 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2394 * On AIX, you get this compiler error message:
2396 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2397 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2399 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2400 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2401 X11Dev... with smit.
2403 * You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
2405 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
2406 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
2407 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
2408 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
2410 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
2412 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
2414 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
2415 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
2416 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
2418 * C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
2420 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
2421 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
2422 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
2424 * Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
2426 These control the actions of Emacs.
2427 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
2428 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
2431 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
2432 of them, then try again.
2434 * After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2436 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2437 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2438 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2440 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2441 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2442 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2443 configure script) that reads:
2444 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2445 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2448 * Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
2449 directly with an X server.
2451 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
2452 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
2453 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
2454 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
2455 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
2456 have made the key binding correctly.
2458 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
2459 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
2460 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
2463 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
2465 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
2466 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
2468 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
2469 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
2470 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
2471 modifier bit not otherwise used.
2473 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
2474 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
2475 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
2476 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
2478 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
2479 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
2481 * `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'
2483 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
2484 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
2485 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
2486 value is just ten seconds.
2488 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
2490 * `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2492 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2493 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2494 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2495 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2497 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2498 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2500 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2501 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2502 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2503 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2505 * On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2507 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2508 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2509 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2511 * Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2513 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2515 * Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
2516 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
2517 * Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
2518 * GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
2520 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
2521 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
2522 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
2523 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
2525 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
2526 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
2528 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
2529 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
2531 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
2533 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
2534 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
2535 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
2536 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
2537 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
2538 be careful not to lose the others.
2540 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
2542 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
2544 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
2545 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
2548 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
2550 * On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
2552 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
2554 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
2556 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
2558 * Self documentation messages are garbled.
2560 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
2561 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
2562 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
2564 * Trouble using ptys on AIX.
2566 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2567 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2569 * Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
2571 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
2573 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
2574 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
2575 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
2576 but tty is giving it back 3.
2578 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
2581 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
2583 should be changed to:
2585 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
2587 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
2590 * Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
2592 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
2594 * Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
2595 * `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
2597 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
2598 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
2601 * Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
2603 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
2604 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
2605 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
2606 with a floating point option other than the default.
2608 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
2609 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
2610 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
2611 floating point option: -fsoft.
2613 * Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
2615 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
2616 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
2617 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
2619 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
2620 whether this problem is present on a given system.
2622 * Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
2625 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
2626 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
2628 * M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2630 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2631 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2633 * Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
2636 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
2637 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
2638 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
2641 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
2642 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
2643 it only if it is undefined.
2645 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
2647 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
2648 happen in a non-login shell.
2650 * X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
2652 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
2653 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
2654 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
2655 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
2657 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
2658 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
2659 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
2661 The easy way to do this is to put
2663 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
2665 in your site-init.el file.
2667 * Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2669 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2670 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2671 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2672 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2674 * Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
2676 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2678 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2680 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2681 Here is how to make more of them.
2685 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2687 # creates eight new pty's
2689 * Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
2691 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2692 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2694 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2695 space available on the machine.
2697 On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2698 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2699 for large blocks (many pages).
2701 * test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
2702 * or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
2703 * or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2704 * or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs
2706 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2707 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2708 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2710 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2711 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2712 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2713 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2714 when unpacking the shell archive.
2716 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2717 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2718 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2720 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2721 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2723 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2724 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2725 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2726 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2727 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2728 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2729 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2730 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2731 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2732 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2733 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2735 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2737 * temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
2739 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2740 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2741 space than was allocated.
2743 This could be caused by
2744 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2745 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2746 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2747 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2748 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2749 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2751 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2752 (not from the directory you expected).
2753 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2754 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2755 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2756 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2759 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2760 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2762 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2763 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2766 * Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
2768 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
2769 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
2770 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
2771 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
2773 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
2774 than the corresponding .el file.
2776 * The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2778 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2780 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2781 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2782 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2783 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2785 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2786 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2787 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2788 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2789 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2791 * Compilation errors on VMS.
2793 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
2794 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
2795 This is not an error. Ignore it.
2797 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
2798 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
2800 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
2801 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
2806 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
2807 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
2808 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
2810 * rmail gets error getting new mail
2812 rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
2813 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
2814 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
2816 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
2817 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
2818 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
2819 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
2820 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
2821 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
2822 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
2824 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2825 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2826 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2827 `mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
2832 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2833 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2834 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2835 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
2841 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
2842 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
2843 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
2844 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
2845 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
2846 directory copy is ineffective.
2848 * Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
2850 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
2851 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
2852 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
2853 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
2854 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
2855 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
2856 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
2857 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
2859 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
2861 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
2862 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
2863 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
2865 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
2866 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
2867 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
2868 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
2869 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
2870 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
2872 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
2873 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
2874 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
2875 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
2876 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
2877 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
2878 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
2879 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
2880 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
2882 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
2883 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
2884 codes. You might as well try it.
2886 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
2887 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
2888 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
2889 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
2890 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
2891 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
2892 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
2893 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
2895 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
2896 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
2897 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
2898 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
2899 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
2902 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
2903 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
2904 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
2905 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
2906 other control characters are already used by emacs.
2908 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
2909 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
2912 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
2913 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
2914 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
2915 automatically. Here is an example:
2917 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
2919 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
2920 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
2923 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
2924 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
2925 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
2926 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
2927 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
2928 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
2929 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
2930 of inferior systems.
2932 * Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
2934 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
2935 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
2936 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
2937 that wants to use flow control.
2939 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
2940 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
2941 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
2943 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
2944 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
2945 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
2947 * Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
2949 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
2950 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
2951 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
2952 control on the local system.
2954 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
2955 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
2956 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
2957 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
2959 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
2960 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
2961 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
2963 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
2964 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
2965 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
2966 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
2968 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
2970 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
2973 * Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
2975 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
2976 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
2977 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
2979 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
2980 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
2981 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
2982 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
2983 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
2984 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
2985 There are several possibilities:
2987 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
2989 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
2990 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
2992 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
2993 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
2996 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
2997 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
2998 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
2999 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
3000 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
3001 tested on many kinds of terminals.
3003 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
3005 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
3006 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
3007 for certain terminals.
3009 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
3010 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
3012 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
3013 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
3015 * Output from Control-V is slow.
3017 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
3018 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
3019 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
3020 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
3021 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
3022 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
3024 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
3025 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
3026 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
3027 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
3028 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
3029 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
3030 time as the operations really take.
3032 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
3033 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
3034 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
3035 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
3036 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
3037 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
3038 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
3039 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
3040 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
3041 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
3043 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
3044 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
3045 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
3046 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
3047 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
3048 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
3051 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
3052 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
3053 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
3055 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
3056 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
3058 * Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
3060 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
3062 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
3063 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
3065 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
3067 * You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
3069 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
3072 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
3073 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
3074 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
3075 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
3076 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
3079 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
3080 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
3081 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
3082 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
3083 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
3084 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
3086 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
3087 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
3088 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
3089 You can probably access help-command via f1.
3091 * Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
3092 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
3093 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
3096 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
3097 call in the RFS server.
3099 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
3100 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
3101 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
3102 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
3104 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
3106 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
3107 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
3108 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
3109 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
3110 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
3111 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
3112 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
3114 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
3116 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3117 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
3118 retrieving revision 1.2
3119 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3120 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
3121 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
3125 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3127 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
3128 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3133 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3135 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
3136 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3140 * Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3142 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3144 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3145 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3147 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3148 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3149 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3150 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3151 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3152 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3153 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3155 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3156 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3157 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3158 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3159 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3162 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3163 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3168 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3169 causes the problem to go away.
3170 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3171 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3173 * 68000 C compiler problems
3175 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3176 These are some that have been observed.
3178 ** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3179 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3180 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3182 ** "cannot reclaim" error.
3184 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3185 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3186 simpler expressions.
3188 ** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3190 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3191 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3193 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3198 test ((int *) arg.y);
3201 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3202 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3203 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3205 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3206 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3208 * C compilers lose on returning unions
3210 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3211 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3212 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3214 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3215 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3220 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"