]> code.delx.au - gnu-emacs/blob - etc/PROBLEMS
Fix last change.
[gnu-emacs] / etc / PROBLEMS
1 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
3
4 * Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
5
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
14 variables).
15
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:
21
22 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
23
24 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
25 the script).
26
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.
29
30 * Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
31
32 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
33 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
34 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
35 __MSVCRT__, like so:
36
37 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
38
39 * Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
40
41 The error message might be something like this:
42
43 Converting d:/emacs-21.1/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
44 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
45 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
46 '0xffffffff'
47 Stop.
48
49 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
50 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
51 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
52 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
53 or EOL conversions.
54
55 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
56 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
57 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
58 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
59 mangling them.
60
61 * Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
62
63 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
64 C backtrace printed by GDB:
65
66 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
67 (gdb) where
68 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
69 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
70 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
71 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
72
73 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
74 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
75 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
76 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
77 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
78 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
79 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
80 distribution:
81
82 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
83 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
84 know what's really going on here. */
85 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
86 0x10000000. */
87 #if defined __linux__
88 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
89 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
90 #endif
91 #endif
92 #endif /* 0 */
93
94 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
95 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
96 should now succeed.
97
98 * JPEG images aren't displayed.
99
100 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
101 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem.
102
103 * Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
104
105 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
106 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
107 patch to assert.h should solve this:
108
109 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
110 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
111 ***************
112 *** 41,47 ****
113 /*
114 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
115 */
116 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
117
118 #else /* debugging enabled */
119
120 --- 41,47 ----
121 /*
122 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
123 */
124 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
125
126 #else /* debugging enabled */
127
128
129
130 * Improving performance with slow X connections
131
132 If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
133 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by
134 configuring Emacs with option `--without-xim'. Configuring Emacs
135 without XIM does not affect the use of Emacs' own input methods, which
136 are part of the Leim package.
137
138 If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
139 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
140
141 * Getting a Meta key on the FreeBSD console
142
143 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
144 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
145 current keymap to a file with the command
146
147 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
148
149 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
150 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
151 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
152 to look like this
153
154 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
155
156 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
157
158 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
159
160 * Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
161
162 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
163 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
164 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
165 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
166 been filed.
167
168 * Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font
169
170 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
171 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
172 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
173 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
174
175 A workaround for this is to add something like
176
177 emacs.waitForWM: false
178
179 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
180 frame's parameter list, like this:
181
182 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
183
184 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
185
186 * Underlines appear at the wrong position.
187
188 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
189 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
190 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
191 problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
192 `.emacs'.
193
194 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
195 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
196 property.
197
198 * When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
199 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
200 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
201 problem disappears.
202
203 * There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
204 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
205 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
206 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
207 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
208 used with neXtaw at run time.
209
210 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
211 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
212 built Emacs with.
213
214 * Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
215
216 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
217 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
218 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
219
220 * Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
221
222 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
223 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
224 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
225 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
226 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
227 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
228 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
229 "colors".
230
231 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
232 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
233 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
234 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
235 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
236 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
237 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
238 capability).
239
240 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
241 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
242 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
243 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
244
245 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
246 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
247 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
248 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
249 emulator.
250
251 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
252 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
253 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
254 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
255 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
256 `global-font-lock-mode'.
257
258 * Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
259
260 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
261 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
262 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
263 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
264 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
265 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
266 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
267 always blinks.
268
269 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
270 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
271 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
272 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
273 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
274 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
275
276 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
277 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
278 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
279 produce a modified terminfo entry.
280
281 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
282 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
283
284 * Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
285
286 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
287 emulation for which it is set up.
288
289 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
290 Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
291 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
292 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
293 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
294 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
295 menu placement.
296
297 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
298 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
299 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
300 developers.
301
302 * Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.1.
303
304 Emacs 21.1 built for MS-Windows doesn't support images and the tool bar.
305 Support for these will be added in future versions.
306
307 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
308 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menu items is not
309 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
310 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
311 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
312 pop-up menu interaction.
313
314 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
315 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
316 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
317 after moving back into it.
318
319 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
320 not as severely as in 21.1.
321
322 Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
323 characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
324
325 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
326 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
327
328 Windows 2000 input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.1).
329 These input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded in
330 the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
331 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
332 work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
333 you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
334 the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
335 ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
336 appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
337 yet.)
338
339 Multilingual text put into the Windows 2000 clipboard by Windows
340 applications cannot be safely pasted into Emacs (as of v21.1). This
341 is because Windows 2000 uses Unicode to represent multilingual text,
342 but Emacs does not yet support Unicode well enough to decode it. This
343 means that Emacs can only interchange non-ASCII text with other
344 Windows 2000 programs if the characters are in the system codepage.
345 Reportedly, a partial solution is to install the Mule-UCS package and
346 set selection-coding-system to utf-16-le-dos.
347
348 * The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
349
350 This can happen because the linker by default only looks for shared
351 libraries, but jpeg distribution by default doesn't build and doesn't
352 install a shared version of the library, `libjpeg.so'. One system
353 where this is known to happen is Compaq OSF/1 (`Tru64'), but it
354 probably isn't limited to that system.
355
356 You can configure the jpeg library with the `--enable-shared' option
357 and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a shared version of libjpeg,
358 which you need to install. Finally, rerun the Emacs configure script,
359 which should now find the jpeg library. Alternatively, modify the
360 generated src/Makefile to link the .a file explicitly.
361
362 (If you need the static version of the jpeg library as well, configure
363 libjpeg with both `--enable-static' and `--enable-shared' options.)
364
365 * Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
366
367 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
368 (RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
369 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
370 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
371 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
372 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
373 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
374 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
375
376 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
377 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
378 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
379 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
380
381 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
382 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
383 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
384 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
385 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
386 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
387 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
388 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
389 `/etc/auto.home'.
390
391 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
392 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
393 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
394 to work around the problem.
395
396 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
397 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
398 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
399 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
400
401 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
402
403 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
404
405 * Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
406
407 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
408 via NFS. Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
409 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
410
411 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
412
413 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
414 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
415
416 * Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
417
418 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
419 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
420 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
421 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
422 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
423 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
424
425 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
426
427 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
428
429 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
430 problem.
431
432 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
433 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
434 `xset fp rehash'.
435
436 * Large file support is disabled on HP-UX. See the comments in
437 src/s/hpux10.h.
438
439 * Crashes when displaying uncompressed GIFs with version
440 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
441
442 * Font Lock displays portions of the bufefr in incorrect faces.
443
444 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
445 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
446 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
447 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
448 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
449 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
450 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
451 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
452 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
453 to the end of a very large buffer.
454
455 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
456 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
457 fontification by setting the variable
458 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
459 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
460
461 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
462 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
463
464 * When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
465 or messed up.
466
467 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
468 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
469 background.
470
471 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
472 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
473 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
474 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style.
475
476 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
477 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
478 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
479 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
480 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
481 present or commented out:
482
483 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
484 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
485 Emacs*Foreground
486 Emacs*Background
487
488 * Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
489
490 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
491 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
492 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
493 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
494 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
495
496 * Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
497
498 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
499 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
500 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
501 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
502 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
503 confuses ange-ftp.
504
505 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
506 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
507 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' directory. To
508 force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the variable
509 `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the client's
510 executable. For example:
511
512 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
513
514 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
515 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
516
517 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
518
519
520 * The latest released version of the W3 package doesn't run properly
521 with Emacs 21 and needs work. However, these problems are already
522 fixed in W3's CVS. The patch below is reported to make w3-4.0pre.46
523 work.
524
525 Some users report they are unable to byte-compile W3 with Emacs 21.
526 If the patches below don't help to resolve your problems, install the
527 CVS version of W3, which should be compatible with Emacs 21.
528
529 diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el
530 --- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-display.el Sun Nov 14 22:00:12 1999
531 +++ w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-display.el Thu Dec 14 14:59:15 2000
532 @@ -181,7 +181,8 @@
533 (dispatch-event (next-command-event)))
534 (error nil))))
535 (t
536 - (if (and (not (sit-for 0)) (input-pending-p))
537 + ;; modified for GNU Emacs 21 by bob@rattlesnake.com on 2000 Dec 14
538 + (if (and (not (sit-for 0)) nil)
539 (condition-case ()
540 (progn
541 (setq w3-pause-keystroke
542 diff -aur --new-file w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-e21.el w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-e21.el
543 --- w3-4.0pre.46-orig/lisp/w3-e21.el Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970
544 +++ w3-4.0pre.46-new/lisp/w3-e21.el Thu Dec 14 14:54:58 2000
545 @@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
546 +;;; w3-e21.el --- ** required for GNU Emacs 21 **
547 +;; Added by bob@rattlesnake.com on 2000 Dec 14
548 +
549 +(require 'w3-e19)
550 +(provide 'w3-e21)
551
552 * On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
553 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
554 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
555 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
556
557 * Compiling on AIX 4.3.x or 4.4 fails.
558
559 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as youir compiler, instead of
560 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
561 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
562 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
563
564 * The PSGML package uses the obsolete variables
565 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
566 longer used by Emacs. These changes to PSGML 1.2.2 fix that.
567
568 --- psgml-edit.el 2001/03/03 00:23:31 1.1
569 +++ psgml-edit.el 2001/03/03 00:24:22
570 @@ -264,4 +264,4 @@
571 ; inhibit-read-only
572 - (before-change-function nil)
573 - (after-change-function nil))
574 + (before-change-functions nil)
575 + (after-change-functions nil))
576 (setq selective-display t)
577 @@ -1544,3 +1544,3 @@
578 (buffer-read-only nil)
579 - (before-change-function nil)
580 + (before-change-functions nil)
581 (markup-index ; match-data index in tag regexp
582 @@ -1596,3 +1596,3 @@
583 (defun sgml-expand-shortref-to-text (name)
584 - (let (before-change-function
585 + (let (before-change-functions
586 (entity (sgml-lookup-entity name (sgml-dtd-entities sgml-dtd-info))))
587 @@ -1613,3 +1613,3 @@
588 (re-found nil)
589 - before-change-function)
590 + before-change-functions)
591 (goto-char sgml-markup-start)
592 @@ -1646,3 +1646,3 @@
593 (goto-char (sgml-element-end element))
594 - (let ((before-change-function nil))
595 + (let ((before-change-functions nil))
596 (sgml-normalize-content element only-one)))
597 Index: psgml-other.el
598 --- psgml-other.el 2001/03/03 00:23:42 1.1
599 +++ psgml-other.el 2001/03/03 00:30:05
600 @@ -32,2 +32,3 @@
601 (require 'easymenu)
602 +(eval-when-compile (require 'cl))
603
604 @@ -61,4 +62,9 @@
605 (let ((submenu
606 - (subseq entries 0 (min (length entries)
607 - sgml-max-menu-size))))
608 +;;; (subseq entries 0 (min (length entries)
609 +;;; sgml-max-menu-size))
610 + (let ((new (copy-sequence entries)))
611 + (setcdr (nthcdr (1- (min (length entries)
612 + sgml-max-menu-size))
613 + new) nil)
614 + new)))
615 (setq entries (nthcdr sgml-max-menu-size entries))
616 @@ -113,9 +119,10 @@
617 (let ((inhibit-read-only t)
618 - (after-change-function nil) ; obsolete variable
619 - (before-change-function nil) ; obsolete variable
620 (after-change-functions nil)
621 - (before-change-functions nil))
622 + (before-change-functions nil)
623 + (modified (buffer-modified-p))
624 + (buffer-undo-list t)
625 + deactivate-mark)
626 (put-text-property start end 'face face)
627 - (when (< start end)
628 - (put-text-property (1- end) end 'rear-nonsticky '(face)))))
629 + (when (and (not modified) (buffer-modified-p))
630 + (set-buffer-modified-p nil))))
631 (t
632 Index: psgml-parse.el
633 --- psgml-parse.el 2001/03/03 00:23:57 1.1
634 +++ psgml-parse.el 2001/03/03 00:29:56
635 @@ -40,2 +40,4 @@
636
637 +(eval-when-compile (require 'cl))
638 +
639 \f
640 @@ -2493,8 +2495,8 @@
641 (setq sgml-scratch-buffer nil))
642 - (when after-change-function ;***
643 - (message "OOPS: after-change-function not NIL in scratch buffer %s: %s"
644 + (when after-change-functions ;***
645 + (message "OOPS: after-change-functions not NIL in scratch buffer %s: %S"
646 (current-buffer)
647 - after-change-function)
648 - (setq before-change-function nil
649 - after-change-function nil))
650 + after-change-functions)
651 + (setq before-change-functions nil
652 + after-change-functions nil))
653 (setq sgml-last-entity-buffer (current-buffer))
654 @@ -2878,6 +2880,5 @@
655 "Set initial state of parsing"
656 - (make-local-variable 'before-change-function)
657 - (setq before-change-function 'sgml-note-change-at)
658 - (make-local-variable 'after-change-function)
659 - (setq after-change-function 'sgml-set-face-after-change)
660 + (set (make-local-variable 'before-change-functions) '(sgml-note-change-at))
661 + (set (make-local-variable 'after-change-functions)
662 + '(sgml-set-face-after-change))
663 (sgml-set-active-dtd-indicator (sgml-dtd-doctype dtd))
664 @@ -3925,7 +3926,7 @@
665 (sgml-need-dtd)
666 - (unless before-change-function
667 - (message "WARN: before-change-function has been lost, restoring (%s)"
668 + (unless before-change-functions
669 + (message "WARN: before-change-functions has been lost, restoring (%s)"
670 (current-buffer))
671 - (setq before-change-function 'sgml-note-change-at)
672 - (setq after-change-function 'sgml-set-face-after-change))
673 + (setq before-change-functions '(sgml-note-change-at))
674 + (setq after-change-functions '(sgml-set-face-after-change)))
675 (sgml-with-parser-syntax-ro
676
677 * TeX'ing the Calc manual fails.
678
679 The following patches allow to build the Calc manual using texinfo.tex
680 from Emacs 19.34 distribution:
681
682 *** calc-maint.e~0 Mon Dec 16 07:11:26 1996
683 --- calc-maint.el Sun Dec 10 14:32:38 2000
684 ***************
685 *** 308,314 ****
686 (insert "@tex\n"
687 "\\global\\advance\\appendixno2\n"
688 "\\gdef\\xref#1.{See ``#1.''}\n")
689 ! (setq midpos (point))
690 (insert "@end tex\n")
691 (insert-buffer-substring srcbuf sumpos endpos)
692 (insert "@bye\n")
693 --- 308,314 ----
694 (insert "@tex\n"
695 "\\global\\advance\\appendixno2\n"
696 "\\gdef\\xref#1.{See ``#1.''}\n")
697 ! (setq midpos (point-marker))
698 (insert "@end tex\n")
699 (insert-buffer-substring srcbuf sumpos endpos)
700 (insert "@bye\n")
701 *** Makefile.~0 Mon Dec 16 07:11:24 1996
702 --- Makefile Sun Dec 10 14:44:00 2000
703 ***************
704 *** 98,106 ****
705 # Format the Calc manual as one printable volume using TeX.
706 tex:
707 $(REMOVE) calc.aux
708 ! $(TEX) calc.texinfo
709 $(TEXINDEX) calc.[cfkptv]?
710 ! $(TEX) calc.texinfo
711 $(PURGE) calc.cp calc.fn calc.pg calc.tp calc.vr
712 $(PURGE) calc.cps calc.fns calc.kys calc.pgs calc.tps calc.vrs
713 $(PURGE) calc.toc
714 --- 98,106 ----
715 # Format the Calc manual as one printable volume using TeX.
716 tex:
717 $(REMOVE) calc.aux
718 ! -$(TEX) calc.texinfo
719 $(TEXINDEX) calc.[cfkptv]?
720 ! -$(TEX) calc.texinfo
721 $(PURGE) calc.cp calc.fn calc.pg calc.tp calc.vr
722 $(PURGE) calc.cps calc.fns calc.kys calc.pgs calc.tps calc.vrs
723 $(PURGE) calc.toc
724
725 * Unicode characters are not unified with other Mule charsets.
726
727 As of v21.1, Emacs charsets are still not unified. This means that
728 characters which belong to charsets such as Latin-2, Greek, Hebrew,
729 etc. and the same characters in the `mule-unicode-*' charsets are
730 different characters, as far as Emacs is concerned. For example, text
731 which includes Unicode characters from the Latin-2 locale cannot be
732 encoded by Emacs with ISO 8859-2 coding system; and if you yank Greek
733 text from a buffer whose buffer-file-coding-system is greek-iso-8bit
734 into a mule-unicode-0100-24ff buffer, Emacs won't be able to save that
735 buffer neither as ISO 8859-7 nor as UTF-8.
736
737 To work around this, install some add-on package such as Mule-UCS.
738
739 * Problems when using Emacs with UTF-8 locales
740
741 Some systems, including recent versions of GNU/Linux, have terminals
742 or X11 subsystems that can be configured to provide Unicode/UTF-8
743 input and display. Normally, such a system sets environment variables
744 such as LANG, LC_CTYPE, or LC_ALL to a string which ends with a
745 `.UTF-8'. For example, a system like this in a French locale might
746 use `fr_FR.UTF-8' as the value of LANG.
747
748 Since Unicode support in Emacs, as of v21.1, is not yet complete (see
749 the previous entry in this file), UTF-8 support is not enabled by
750 default, even in UTF-8 locales. Thus, some Emacs features, such as
751 non-ASCII keyboard input, might appear to be broken in these locales.
752 To solve these problems, you need to turn on some options in your
753 `.emacs' file. Specifically, the following customizations should make
754 Emacs work correctly with UTF-8 input and text:
755
756 (setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
757 (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
758 (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
759 (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
760 (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
761
762 * The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
763
764 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
765 slots now. If the built-in Unicode/UTF-8 support is insufficient,
766 e.g. if you need more CJK coverage, use the current Mule-UCS package.
767 Any files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode won't be read
768 correctly by Emacs 21.
769
770 * Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
771
772 The error message might be something like this:
773
774 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
775
776 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
777 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
778 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
779 corrects that.
780
781 * ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
782
783 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
784 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
785 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
786
787 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
788
789 * On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
790 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
791 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
792 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
793 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
794
795 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
796 process invokes Emacs several times.
797
798 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
799 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
800 can be found.
801
802 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
803 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
804 specified run-time search path in the executable.
805
806 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
807
808 * On Solaris 2.7, building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
809 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
810 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
811 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
812 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
813 and the default CFLAGS.
814
815 * Compiling syntax.c with the OPENSTEP 4.2 compiler gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
816
817 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
818 following message:
819
820 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
821
822 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
823 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
824 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
825
826 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
827 {
828 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
829 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
830
831 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
832 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
833
834 * Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
835
836 A typical error message might be something like
837
838 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
839
840 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
841 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
842 are:
843
844 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
845
846 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
847 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
848 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
849
850 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
851 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
852 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
853
854 * Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
855
856 The typical error message might be like this:
857
858 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
859
860 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
861 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
862 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
863 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
864 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
865 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
866 its loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
867
868 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
869 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
870
871 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
872 file.
873
874 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
875 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
876 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
877
878 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
879
880 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
881 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
882 load-path.
883
884 * Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
885
886 An example of such an error is:
887
888 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
889
890 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your classpath.
891 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
892 present in load-path:
893
894 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
895
896 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
897 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
898 load-path.
899
900 * Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
901
902 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
903 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
904 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
905 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
906 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
907 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
908
909 update-alternatives --config ftp
910
911 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
912
913 * Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
914
915 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
916 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
917 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
918 work when an antivirus package is installed.
919
920 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
921 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
922 or disable it entirely.
923
924 * On Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
925
926 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
927 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
928 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
929 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
930
931 * Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
932 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
933 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
934 seen.
935
936 * After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working.
937
938 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
939 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
940 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
941 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
942 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
943 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
944 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
945
946 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
947 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
948 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
949 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
950 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
951 modifier:
952
953 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
954
955 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
956 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
957
958 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
959
960 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
961 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
962 keys can serve as Meta.
963
964 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
965 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
966
967 * On OSF/Dec Unix/Tru64/<whatever it is this year> under X locally or
968 remotely, M-SPC acts as a `compose' key with strange results. See
969 keyboard(5).
970
971 Changing Alt_L to Meta_L fixes it:
972 % xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L'
973 % xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R'
974
975 * Error "conflicting types for `initstate'" compiling with GCC on Irix 6.
976
977 Install GCC 2.95 or a newer version, and this problem should go away.
978 It is possible that this problem results from upgrading the operating
979 system without reinstalling GCC; so you could also try reinstalling
980 the same version of GCC, and telling us whether that fixes the problem.
981
982 * Emacs dumps core on Solaris in function IMCheckWindow.
983
984 This was reported to happen when Emacs runs with more than one frame,
985 and one of them is closed, either with "C-x 5 0" or from the window
986 manager.
987
988 This bug was reported to Sun as
989
990 Gtk apps dump core in ximlocal.so.2:IMCheckIMWindow()
991 Bug Reports: 4463537
992
993 Installing Solaris 8 patch 108773-12 for Sparc and 108774-12 for x86
994 reportedly fixes the bug, which appears to be inside the shared
995 library xiiimp.so.
996
997 Alternatively, you can configure Emacs with `--with-xim=no' to prevent
998 the core dump, but will loose X input method support, of course. (You
999 can use Emacs's own input methods instead, if you install Leim.)
1000
1001 * On Solaris 7, Emacs gets a segmentation fault when starting up using X.
1002
1003 This results from Sun patch 107058-01 (SunOS 5.7: Patch for
1004 assembler) if you use GCC version 2.7 or later.
1005 To work around it, either install patch 106950-03 or later,
1006 or uninstall patch 107058-01, or install the GNU Binutils.
1007 Then recompile Emacs, and it should work.
1008
1009 * With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
1010
1011 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
1012
1013 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
1014 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
1015 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
1016 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
1017 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
1018 /******************************************************************
1019
1020 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
1021 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
1022 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
1023 XLCd lcd;
1024 {
1025 - char* begin;
1026 - char* end;
1027 + char* begin = NULL;
1028 + char* end = NULL;
1029 char* ret;
1030 int i = 0;
1031 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
1032 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
1033 }
1034 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
1035 if (ret != NULL) {
1036 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
1037 + if (begin != NULL) {
1038 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
1039 + } else {
1040 + ret[0] = '\0';
1041 + }
1042 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
1043 }
1044 return ret;
1045
1046
1047 * Emacs crashes on Irix 6.5 on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
1048
1049 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
1050
1051 * Emacs crashes in utmpname on Irix 5.3.
1052
1053 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
1054 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
1055
1056 * The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1057
1058 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1059 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1060 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1061 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1062 purposes.
1063
1064 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1065 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1066
1067 * On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
1068 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
1069
1070 You can fix this by editing the file:
1071
1072 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
1073
1074 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
1075
1076 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1077
1078 that should read:
1079
1080 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1081
1082 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
1083
1084 * Emacs on Digital Unix 4.0 fails to build, giving error message
1085 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
1086
1087 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
1088 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
1089
1090 * Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
1091
1092 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
1093 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
1094 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
1095
1096 * Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1097
1098 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1099 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1100 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1101 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1102 change this.
1103
1104 * When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
1105
1106 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
1107 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
1108 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
1109 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
1110 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
1111
1112 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
1113 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
1114
1115 * Failure in unexec while dumping emacs on Digital Unix 4.0
1116
1117 This problem manifests itself as an error message
1118
1119 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
1120
1121 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
1122 were built for an older system version,
1123
1124 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
1125
1126 made the problem go away.
1127
1128 * No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
1129
1130 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
1131 as of 8 Dec 1998.
1132
1133 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
1134
1135 * As of version 20.4, Emacs doesn't work properly if configured for
1136 the Motif toolkit and linked against the free LessTif library. The
1137 next Emacs release is expected to work with LessTif.
1138
1139 * Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1140
1141 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1142 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1143 likely to cause it.
1144
1145 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1146
1147 * Emacs makes HPUX 11.0 crash.
1148
1149 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1150
1151 * Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine (HPUX 10.20).
1152
1153 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
1154
1155 * The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
1156 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
1157 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
1158 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
1159
1160 * Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
1161 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
1162 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
1163 earlier versions.
1164
1165 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
1166 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
1167 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
1168 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
1169 (cond
1170 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
1171 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
1172 + (insert-file-contents entity)
1173 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
1174 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
1175 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
1176
1177 * Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUC TeX installed.
1178
1179 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUC TeX; upgrading should solve
1180 these problems.
1181
1182 * No colors in AUC TeX with Emacs 21.
1183
1184 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
1185 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
1186
1187 * Running TeX from AUC TeX package with Emacs 20.3 gives a Lisp error
1188 about a read-only tex output buffer.
1189
1190 This problem appeared for AUC TeX version 9.9j and some earlier
1191 versions. Here is a patch for the file tex-buf.el in the AUC TeX
1192 package.
1193
1194 diff -c auctex/tex-buf.el~ auctex/tex-buf.el
1195 *** auctex/tex-buf.el~ Wed Jul 29 18:35:32 1998
1196 --- auctex/tex-buf.el Sat Sep 5 15:20:38 1998
1197 ***************
1198 *** 545,551 ****
1199 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1200 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1201 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1202 ! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer)
1203 (set-buffer buffer)
1204 (if dir (cd dir))
1205 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1206 - --- 545,552 ----
1207 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1208 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1209 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1210 ! (let (temp-buffer-show-function temp-buffer-show-hook)
1211 ! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer))
1212 (set-buffer buffer)
1213 (if dir (cd dir))
1214 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1215
1216 * On Irix 6.3, substituting environment variables in file names
1217 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
1218
1219 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
1220
1221 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
1222 003082 August 11, 1998.
1223
1224 * After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1225
1226 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1227 (standard-display-european t)
1228 That should be changed to
1229 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1230
1231 * Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
1232
1233 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
1234 supplies the `install-info' command.
1235
1236 * Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key, on HPUX.
1237
1238 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1239 rights, containing this text:
1240
1241 --------------------------------
1242 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1243 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1244 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1245 EOF
1246
1247 xmodmap - << EOF
1248 clear mod1
1249 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1250 add mod1 = Meta_L
1251 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1252 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1253 EOF
1254 --------------------------------
1255
1256 * Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1257
1258 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1259 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1260 of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1261 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1262 while, Emacs will print a message:
1263
1264 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1265
1266 A workaround is to not use `klipper'.
1267
1268 * Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
1269 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
1270 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
1271
1272 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
1273 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
1274 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
1275
1276 * M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1277
1278 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1279 for character composition.
1280
1281 * Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
1282
1283 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
1284 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
1285 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
1286
1287 127.0.0.1 localhost
1288 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
1289
1290 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
1291
1292 * Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs on Digital Unix 4.0.
1293
1294 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
1295 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
1296 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
1297 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
1298 in Emacs.
1299
1300 * When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
1301
1302 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
1303 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
1304 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
1305 support for 8-bit characters.
1306
1307 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
1308 this at your shell's prompt:
1309
1310 ispell -vv
1311
1312 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
1313 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
1314 does not.
1315
1316 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
1317 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
1318 Then rebuild the speller.
1319
1320 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
1321 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
1322
1323 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
1324 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
1325 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
1326 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
1327 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
1328
1329 * On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1330 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1331
1332 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1333 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1334 known to work.
1335
1336 * On Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
1337 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
1338
1339 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
1340
1341 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
1342 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
1343 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
1344 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
1345 AltGr has been pressed.
1346
1347 * Under some Windows X-servers, Emacs' display is incorrect
1348
1349 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
1350 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
1351 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
1352 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
1353
1354 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions as
1355 well. The problem lies in the X-server settings.
1356
1357 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
1358 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
1359 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
1360 selection".
1361
1362 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
1363 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
1364 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
1365 here.
1366
1367 * On Solaris 2, Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
1368
1369 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
1370 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
1371 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
1372 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
1373 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
1374 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
1375 are currently recommended for your host.
1376
1377 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
1378 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
1379 105284-18 might fix it again.
1380
1381 * On Solaris 2.6 and 7, the Compose key does not work.
1382
1383 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
1384 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
1385 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
1386 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
1387
1388 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
1389 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
1390 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
1391 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
1392 should do.
1393
1394 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
1395 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
1396 libraries.
1397
1398 * Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
1399
1400 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
1401 either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
1402 calls for specifying this.
1403
1404 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
1405 mail-host-address to the value you want.
1406
1407 * Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs, on UnixWare 2.1
1408
1409 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
1410 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
1411 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
1412 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
1413 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
1414 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
1415
1416 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
1417 But you have to be root to do it.
1418
1419 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
1420
1421 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
1422 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
1423 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
1424 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
1425 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
1426
1427 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
1428 These changes take effect when you reboot.
1429
1430 * Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1431
1432 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1433 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1434 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1435 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1436
1437 Here's how to do this:
1438
1439 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1440
1441 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1442 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1443 to normal, do
1444
1445 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1446
1447 * Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
1448
1449 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
1450 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
1451 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
1452
1453 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
1454 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
1455 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
1456
1457 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
1458 display all the characters Emacs supports.
1459
1460 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
1461 missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
1462 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
1463 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
1464 of this character to display a space.
1465
1466 * Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
1467
1468 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
1469
1470 * Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
1471
1472 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
1473 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
1474 lines do not overlap.
1475
1476 * You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
1477 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
1478
1479 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
1480 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
1481 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
1482
1483 * In FreeBSD 2.1.5, useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1484 directories that have the +t bit.
1485
1486 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1487 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1488 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1489 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1490
1491 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1492 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1493
1494 * When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1495 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1496
1497 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1498
1499 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1500
1501 * Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
1502 appear on disk.
1503
1504 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
1505 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
1506 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
1507 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
1508 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
1509 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
1510
1511 * "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
1512
1513 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
1514 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
1515 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
1516 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
1517 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
1518 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
1519
1520 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
1521 them to two different keys.
1522
1523 * Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup, on AIX4.2.
1524
1525 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
1526 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
1527
1528 * movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
1529
1530 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
1531 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
1532 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
1533 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
1534 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
1535 old POP protocol.
1536
1537 * Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
1538
1539 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
1540 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
1541 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
1542 happens to exist on your X server).
1543
1544 * Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
1545
1546 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
1547 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
1548 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
1549
1550 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
1551 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
1552
1553 * Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on HPUX 9 after you delete a frame.
1554
1555 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
1556 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
1557 does not happen.
1558
1559 * Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1560
1561 We suspect that this is a similar bug in the X libraries provided by
1562 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1563 makes the problem stop:
1564
1565 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1566 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1567 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1568 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1569
1570 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1571 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1572
1573 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1574 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1575 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1576
1577 * Problems running Perl under Emacs on Windows NT/95.
1578
1579 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
1580 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
1581
1582 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
1583 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
1584 with the user.
1585
1586 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
1587 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
1588 communicate with the subprocess.
1589
1590 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
1591 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
1592 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
1593 stdin.
1594
1595 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
1596
1597 For Perl 4:
1598
1599 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
1600 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
1601 ***************
1602 *** 68,74 ****
1603 $rcfile=".perldb";
1604 }
1605 else {
1606 ! $console = "con";
1607 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1608 }
1609
1610 --- 68,74 ----
1611 $rcfile=".perldb";
1612 }
1613 else {
1614 ! $console = "";
1615 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1616 }
1617
1618
1619 For Perl 5:
1620 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
1621 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
1622 ***************
1623 *** 22,28 ****
1624 $rcfile=".perldb";
1625 }
1626 elsif (-e "con") {
1627 ! $console = "con";
1628 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1629 }
1630 else {
1631 --- 22,28 ----
1632 $rcfile=".perldb";
1633 }
1634 elsif (-e "con") {
1635 ! $console = "";
1636 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1637 }
1638 else {
1639
1640 * Problems running DOS programs on Windows NT versions earlier than 3.51.
1641
1642 Some DOS programs, such as pkzip/pkunzip will not work at all, while
1643 others will only work if their stdin is redirected from a file or NUL.
1644
1645 When a DOS program does not work, a new process is actually created, but
1646 hangs. It cannot be interrupted from Emacs, and might need to be killed
1647 by an external program if Emacs is hung waiting for the process to
1648 finish. If Emacs is not waiting for it, you should be able to kill the
1649 instance of ntvdm that is running the hung process from Emacs, if you
1650 can find out the process id.
1651
1652 It is safe to run most DOS programs using call-process (eg. M-! and
1653 M-|) since stdin is then redirected from a file, but not with
1654 start-process since that redirects stdin to a pipe. Also, running DOS
1655 programs in a shell buffer prompt without redirecting stdin does not
1656 work.
1657
1658 * Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs:
1659
1660 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
1661
1662 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
1663 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
1664 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
1665
1666 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
1667 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
1668 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
1669 incorrect library functions.
1670
1671 * When compiling with DJGPP on Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
1672
1673 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
1674 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
1675 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
1676 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
1677 the front of your PATH environment variable.
1678
1679 * When compiling with DJGPP on Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
1680 like make-docfile.
1681
1682 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
1683 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
1684 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
1685 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
1686
1687 * Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
1688 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
1689
1690 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
1691 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
1692 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
1693 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
1694
1695 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
1696 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
1697 Lisp.
1698
1699 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
1700 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
1701 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
1702 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
1703 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
1704 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
1705 explains this issue in more detail.
1706
1707 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
1708 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
1709 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
1710 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
1711 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
1712 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
1713 properly truncated.
1714
1715 * Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
1716
1717 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
1718
1719 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
1720 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
1721 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
1722 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
1723 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
1724 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
1725 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
1726 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
1727 your system works as before.
1728
1729 * On Windows 95, Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
1730
1731 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
1732 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
1733
1734 * Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on Windows 95.
1735
1736 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1737 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
1738 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way.
1739
1740 * `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
1741
1742 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
1743 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
1744 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
1745 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
1746 does not work with this version of ncurses.
1747
1748 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
1749
1750 * Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
1751
1752 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
1753 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
1754 as GCC.
1755
1756 * Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly truncated
1757 on GNU/Linux systems.
1758
1759 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
1760 1.3.75.
1761
1762 * Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1763
1764 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1765 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1766 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1767 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1768
1769 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1770
1771 * On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
1772
1773 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
1774 version of Solaris that you are using.
1775
1776 * Emacs dumps core on startup, on Solaris.
1777
1778 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
1779 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
1780 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
1781 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
1782 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
1783
1784 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
1785 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
1786 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
1787 for certain.
1788
1789 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
1790 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
1791 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
1792
1793 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
1794 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
1795
1796 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
1797 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1798
1799 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
1800 Solaris 2.5.
1801
1802 * Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called, on Solaris.
1803
1804 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
1805 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
1806 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
1807
1808 * "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes on HPUX, in
1809 Emacs built with Motif.
1810
1811 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1812 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1813
1814 * On Irix 6.0, make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi
1815
1816 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
1817 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
1818 find that string, and take out the spaces.
1819
1820 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
1821
1822 * "out of virtual swap space" on Irix 5.3
1823
1824 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
1825 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
1826 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
1827 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
1828 command `swap -l'.
1829
1830 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
1831 line like this:
1832
1833 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
1834
1835 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
1836 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
1837 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
1838 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
1839 information.
1840
1841 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
1842 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
1843 on the network that can log on to the host.
1844
1845 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
1846 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
1847 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
1848 icons.
1849
1850 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
1851 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
1852 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
1853 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
1854
1855 * With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
1856 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
1857
1858 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
1859 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
1860 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
1861
1862 * On SunOS 4.1.3, Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
1863
1864 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
1865 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
1866 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
1867 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
1868
1869 * On SunOS 4, Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
1870 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
1871
1872 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
1873
1874 * On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1875 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1876
1877 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1878 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
1879 Definitions" to make them defined.
1880
1881 * On SunOS, you get linker errors
1882 ld: Undefined symbol
1883 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
1884 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
1885
1886 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
1887 or link libXmu statically.
1888
1889 * On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as
1890 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
1891 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
1892
1893 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
1894 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
1895 you build Emacs:
1896
1897 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
1898 chmod 664 libIM.a
1899 ranlib libIM.a
1900
1901 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
1902 Makefile).
1903
1904 * Unpredictable segmentation faults on Solaris 2.3 and 2.4.
1905
1906 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
1907 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
1908
1909 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
1910
1911 * Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for
1912 Windows.
1913
1914 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
1915 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
1916 problem.
1917
1918 * Emacs crashes at startup on MSDOS.
1919
1920 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
1921 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
1922 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
1923 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
1924 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
1925
1926 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
1927 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
1928 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
1929 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
1930
1931 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
1932 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
1933 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
1934 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
1935 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
1936
1937 * A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
1938
1939 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
1940 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
1941
1942 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
1943
1944 * Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
1945
1946 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
1947 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
1948 Emacs's configure script.
1949
1950 * Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
1951
1952 This results from a bug in GNU Sed version 2.03. To solve the
1953 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
1954 configure script.
1955
1956 * On Sunos 4.1.1, there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
1957
1958 If you get errors such as
1959
1960 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1961 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
1962 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
1963
1964 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
1965 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
1966 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
1967 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
1968 ones available when you build Emacs.
1969
1970 * The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1971 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1972
1973 This is because HPUX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1974 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1975 configures the X server.
1976
1977 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1978 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1979 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1980 EOF
1981
1982 xmodmap - << EOF
1983 clear mod1
1984 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1985 add mod1 = Meta_L
1986 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1987 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1988 EOF
1989
1990 * The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
1991
1992 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
1993 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
1994 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
1995 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
1996 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
1997
1998 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
1999
2000 * Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
2001
2002 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
2003 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
2004
2005 * Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys.
2006
2007 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2008 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2009 to allocate ptys reliably.
2010
2011 * On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
2012
2013 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
2014 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
2015 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
2016 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
2017 syms.h.
2018
2019 * Slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
2020
2021 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
2022 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
2023
2024 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
2025 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
2026 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
2027 networked and non-networked machines.
2028
2029 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
2030
2031 ** Networked Case
2032
2033 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
2034 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
2035 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
2036
2037 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
2038
2039 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
2040 lines:
2041
2042 order hosts, bind
2043 multi on
2044
2045 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
2046 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
2047 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
2048 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
2049
2050 ** Non-Networked Case
2051
2052 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
2053 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
2054 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
2055 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
2056 file is not necessary with this approach.
2057
2058 * On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
2059 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
2060
2061 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
2062 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
2063
2064 #if ThreadedX
2065 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2066 #endif
2067
2068 to:
2069
2070 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
2071 #if ThreadedX
2072 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2073 #endif
2074 #endif
2075
2076 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
2077 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
2078 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
2079 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
2080 definition for your type of machine and system.
2081
2082 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
2083 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
2084 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
2085
2086 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
2087 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
2088 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
2089 patch.
2090
2091 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
2092 he changed
2093 #define ThreadedX YES
2094 to
2095 #define ThreadedX NO
2096 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
2097 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
2098 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
2099
2100 * With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
2101 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
2102
2103 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
2104 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
2105 another escape character in kermit. One user did
2106
2107 set escape-character 17
2108
2109 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
2110
2111 * The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
2112
2113 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
2114
2115 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
2116
2117 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
2118 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
2119 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
2120 the resource prevents the problem.
2121
2122 * Emacs gets hung shortly after startup, on Sunos 4.1.3.
2123
2124 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2125 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2126
2127 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2128 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2129 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2130 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2131 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2132
2133 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2134 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2135
2136 * Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
2137
2138 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
2139 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
2140 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
2141 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
2142 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
2143 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
2144 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
2145 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
2146 not to work.
2147
2148 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
2149 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
2150 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
2151 same directory where system header files are kept.
2152
2153 * On Solaris 2.x, GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported"
2154
2155 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2156 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2157 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2158 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2159 described in the Solaris FAQ
2160 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2161 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
2162
2163 * The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
2164
2165 This shell command should fix it:
2166
2167 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
2168
2169 * Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
2170
2171 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
2172 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
2173 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
2174 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
2175 GCC.
2176
2177 * On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2178
2179 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2180 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2181 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2182
2183 * You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
2184
2185 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
2186 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
2187 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
2188 the Files menu).
2189
2190 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
2191 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
2192 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
2193 workaround can be found.
2194
2195 * Unusable default font on SCO 3.2v4.
2196
2197 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
2198 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
2199 fonts, so it does not work.
2200
2201 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
2202 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
2203 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
2204 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
2205 resources affect Emacs also:
2206
2207 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
2208 *Background: scoBackground
2209 *Foreground: scoForeground
2210
2211 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
2212 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
2213
2214 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
2215 Emacs*Background: white
2216 Emacs*Foreground: black
2217
2218 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
2219 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
2220 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
2221 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
2222 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
2223 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
2224 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
2225 Open Desktop display.
2226
2227 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
2228 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
2229
2230 * rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
2231
2232 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
2233 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
2234
2235 * Emacs is slow using X11R5 on HP/UX.
2236
2237 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2238 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2239 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2240 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2241 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2242 install them and rebuild Emacs.
2243
2244 * Loading fonts is very slow.
2245
2246 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
2247 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
2248 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
2249 "fonts.scale".
2250
2251 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
2252 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
2253
2254 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
2255 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
2256 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
2257
2258 * On AIX 3.2.4, releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2259
2260 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2261 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2262 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2263 treated as control characters.
2264
2265 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2266 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2267
2268 * display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2269
2270 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2271 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2272 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2273 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2274 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2275
2276 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2277 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2278
2279 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2280
2281 * On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2282
2283 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2284 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2285
2286 * Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
2287 segmentation fault and core dump.
2288
2289 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
2290 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
2291
2292 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
2293
2294 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
2295 untar it :-).
2296
2297 * Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2298
2299 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2300
2301 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2302
2303 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2304
2305 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2306 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2307
2308 * Link failure on IBM AIX 1.3 ptf 0013.
2309
2310 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2311 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2312 workaround/fix is:
2313
2314 cd /lib
2315 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2316 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2317
2318 * Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose on a Sun.
2319
2320 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
2321 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
2322 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
2323 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
2324 toolkit.)
2325
2326 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
2327 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
2328 X11R4, then use it in the link.
2329
2330 * Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'
2331
2332 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2333 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2334 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2335 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2336
2337 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2338
2339 * In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
2340
2341 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
2342 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
2343 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
2344 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
2345
2346 if ($?EMACS) then
2347 if ($EMACS == "t") then
2348 unset edit
2349 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
2350 endif
2351 endif
2352
2353 * An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
2354 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
2355
2356 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
2357 emacs*Cursor: black
2358 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
2359 that isn't a color.)
2360
2361 The fix is to correct your X resources.
2362
2363 * Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1 using --with-x-toolkit.
2364
2365 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
2366 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
2367 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
2368
2369 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
2370 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
2371
2372 * Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
2373
2374 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
2375 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
2376 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
2377
2378 * src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2379
2380 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2381 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.
2382
2383 * Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
2384
2385 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
2386 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
2387 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
2388 font.
2389
2390 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
2391 your font path, like this:
2392
2393 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
2394
2395 * Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
2396
2397 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
2398
2399 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
2400
2401 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
2402 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
2403 want, rewrite the resource.
2404
2405 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
2406 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
2407 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
2408
2409 * --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
2410
2411 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
2412 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
2413 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
2414 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
2415 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
2416 and Solaris in version 19.29.
2417
2418 * `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2419
2420 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2421 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2422 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2423 hand.
2424
2425 * --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong on BSD/386.
2426
2427 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
2428 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
2429 such as bash.
2430
2431 * Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies, on Sunos 5.3.
2432
2433 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2434 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2435 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2436 communicating through pipes.
2437
2438 * Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2439
2440 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2441 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2442 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2443 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2444 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2445 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2446 obtain the destination address.
2447
2448 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2449 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2450 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
2451 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
2452 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2453 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2454 of this writing, these official versions are available:
2455
2456 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2457 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2458 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2459 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2460 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2461
2462 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2463 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2464
2465 * On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs:
2466
2467 Could not load program emacs
2468 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2469 Error was: Exec format error
2470
2471 or this one:
2472
2473 Could not load program .emacs
2474 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2475 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2476 Error was: Exec format error
2477
2478 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2479 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2480
2481 * On AIX, you get this compiler error message:
2482
2483 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2484 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2485
2486 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2487 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2488 X11Dev... with smit.
2489
2490 * You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
2491
2492 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
2493 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
2494 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
2495 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
2496
2497 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
2498
2499 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
2500
2501 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
2502 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
2503 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
2504
2505 * C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
2506
2507 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
2508 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
2509 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
2510
2511 * Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
2512
2513 These control the actions of Emacs.
2514 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
2515 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
2516 "load" will search.
2517
2518 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
2519 of them, then try again.
2520
2521 * After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2522
2523 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2524 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2525 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2526
2527 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2528 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2529 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2530 configure script) that reads:
2531 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2532 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2533 the kernel bug.
2534
2535 * Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
2536 directly with an X server.
2537
2538 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
2539 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
2540 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
2541 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
2542 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
2543 have made the key binding correctly.
2544
2545 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
2546 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
2547 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
2548 default.
2549
2550 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
2551
2552 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
2553 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
2554
2555 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
2556 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
2557 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
2558 modifier bit not otherwise used.
2559
2560 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
2561 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
2562 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
2563 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
2564
2565 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
2566 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
2567
2568 * `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'
2569
2570 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
2571 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
2572 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
2573 value is just ten seconds.
2574
2575 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
2576
2577 * `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2578
2579 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2580 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2581 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2582 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2583
2584 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2585 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2586
2587 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2588 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2589 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2590 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2591
2592 * On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2593
2594 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2595 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2596 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2597
2598 * Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2599
2600 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2601
2602 * Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
2603 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
2604 * Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
2605 * GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
2606
2607 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
2608 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
2609 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
2610 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
2611
2612 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
2613 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
2614
2615 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
2616 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
2617
2618 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
2619
2620 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
2621 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
2622 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
2623 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
2624 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
2625 be careful not to lose the others.
2626
2627 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
2628
2629 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
2630
2631 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
2632 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
2633 again to say this:
2634
2635 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
2636
2637 * On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
2638
2639 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
2640
2641 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
2642
2643 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
2644
2645 * Self documentation messages are garbled.
2646
2647 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
2648 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
2649 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
2650
2651 * Trouble using ptys on AIX.
2652
2653 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2654 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2655
2656 * Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
2657
2658 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
2659
2660 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
2661 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
2662 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
2663 but tty is giving it back 3.
2664
2665 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
2666 word:
2667
2668 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
2669
2670 should be changed to:
2671
2672 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
2673
2674 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
2675 and into .login.
2676
2677 * Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
2678
2679 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
2680
2681 * Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
2682 * `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
2683
2684 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
2685 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
2686 the environment.
2687
2688 * Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
2689
2690 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
2691 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
2692 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
2693 with a floating point option other than the default.
2694
2695 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
2696 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
2697 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
2698 floating point option: -fsoft.
2699
2700 * Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
2701
2702 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
2703 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
2704 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
2705
2706 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
2707 whether this problem is present on a given system.
2708
2709 * Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
2710 as a concentrator.
2711
2712 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
2713 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
2714
2715 * M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2716
2717 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2718 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2719
2720 * Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
2721 terminal type.
2722
2723 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
2724 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
2725 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
2726 emulates.
2727
2728 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
2729 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
2730 it only if it is undefined.
2731
2732 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
2733
2734 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
2735 happen in a non-login shell.
2736
2737 * X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
2738
2739 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
2740 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
2741 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
2742 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
2743
2744 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
2745 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
2746 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
2747
2748 The easy way to do this is to put
2749
2750 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
2751
2752 in your site-init.el file.
2753
2754 * Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2755
2756 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2757 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2758 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2759 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2760
2761 * Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
2762
2763 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2764
2765 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2766
2767 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2768 Here is how to make more of them.
2769
2770 % cd /dev
2771 % ls pty*
2772 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2773 % /etc/crpty 8
2774 # creates eight new pty's
2775
2776 * Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
2777
2778 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2779 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2780
2781 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2782 space available on the machine.
2783
2784 On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2785 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2786 for large blocks (many pages).
2787
2788 * test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
2789 * or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
2790 * or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2791 * or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs
2792
2793 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2794 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2795 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2796
2797 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2798 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2799 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2800 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2801 when unpacking the shell archive.
2802
2803 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2804 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2805 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2806
2807 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2808 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2809
2810 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2811 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2812 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2813 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2814 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2815 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2816 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2817 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2818 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2819 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2820 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2821 and remake temacs.
2822 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2823
2824 * temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
2825
2826 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2827 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2828 space than was allocated.
2829
2830 This could be caused by
2831 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2832 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2833 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2834 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2835 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2836 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2837 deleting that file.
2838 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2839 (not from the directory you expected).
2840 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2841 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2842 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2843 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2844 the space required.
2845
2846 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2847 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2848
2849 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2850 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2851 problem.
2852
2853 * Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
2854
2855 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
2856 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
2857 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
2858 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
2859
2860 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
2861 than the corresponding .el file.
2862
2863 * The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2864
2865 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2866
2867 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2868 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2869 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2870 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2871
2872 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2873 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2874 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2875 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2876 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2877
2878 * Compilation errors on VMS.
2879
2880 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
2881 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
2882 This is not an error. Ignore it.
2883
2884 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
2885 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
2886
2887 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
2888 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
2889 char c = -1, d = 1;
2890 int i;
2891
2892 i = d ? c : d;
2893 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
2894 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
2895 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
2896
2897 * rmail gets error getting new mail
2898
2899 rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
2900 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
2901 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
2902
2903 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
2904 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
2905 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
2906 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
2907 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
2908 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
2909 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
2910
2911 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2912 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2913 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2914 `mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
2915
2916 chgrp mail movemail
2917 chmod 2755 movemail
2918
2919 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
2920 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
2921 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
2922 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
2923 make install.
2924
2925 chgrp mail movemail
2926 chmod 2755 movemail
2927
2928 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
2929 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
2930 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
2931 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
2932 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
2933 directory copy is ineffective.
2934
2935 * Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
2936
2937 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
2938 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
2939 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
2940 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
2941 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
2942 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
2943 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
2944 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
2945
2946 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
2947
2948 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
2949 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
2950 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
2951
2952 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
2953 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
2954 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
2955 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
2956 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
2957 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
2958
2959 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
2960 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
2961 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
2962 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
2963 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
2964 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
2965 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
2966 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
2967 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
2968
2969 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
2970 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
2971 codes. You might as well try it.
2972
2973 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
2974 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
2975 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
2976 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
2977 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
2978 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
2979 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
2980 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
2981
2982 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
2983 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
2984 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
2985 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
2986 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
2987 control handling.)
2988
2989 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
2990 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
2991 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
2992 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
2993 other control characters are already used by emacs.
2994
2995 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
2996 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
2997 order to continue.
2998
2999 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
3000 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
3001 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
3002 automatically. Here is an example:
3003
3004 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
3005
3006 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
3007 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
3008 manually.
3009
3010 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
3011 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
3012 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
3013 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
3014 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
3015 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
3016 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
3017 of inferior systems.
3018
3019 * Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
3020
3021 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
3022 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
3023 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
3024 that wants to use flow control.
3025
3026 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
3027 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
3028 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
3029
3030 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
3031 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
3032 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
3033
3034 * Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
3035
3036 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
3037 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
3038 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
3039 control on the local system.
3040
3041 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
3042 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
3043 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
3044 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
3045
3046 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
3047 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
3048 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
3049
3050 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
3051 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
3052 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
3053 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
3054
3055 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
3056
3057 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
3058 info.
3059
3060 * Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
3061
3062 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
3063 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
3064 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
3065
3066 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
3067 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
3068 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
3069 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
3070 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
3071 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
3072 There are several possibilities:
3073
3074 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
3075
3076 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
3077 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
3078
3079 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
3080 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
3081 by termcap.
3082
3083 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
3084 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
3085 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
3086 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
3087 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
3088 tested on many kinds of terminals.
3089
3090 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
3091
3092 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
3093 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
3094 for certain terminals.
3095
3096 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
3097 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
3098
3099 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
3100 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
3101
3102 * Output from Control-V is slow.
3103
3104 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
3105 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
3106 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
3107 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
3108 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
3109 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
3110
3111 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
3112 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
3113 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
3114 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
3115 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
3116 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
3117 time as the operations really take.
3118
3119 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
3120 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
3121 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
3122 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
3123 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
3124 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
3125 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
3126 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
3127 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
3128 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
3129
3130 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
3131 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
3132 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
3133 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
3134 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
3135 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
3136 `cm' string.
3137
3138 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
3139 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
3140 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
3141
3142 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
3143 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
3144
3145 * Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
3146
3147 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
3148
3149 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
3150 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
3151
3152 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
3153
3154 * You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
3155
3156 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
3157 after a day or two.
3158
3159 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
3160 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
3161 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
3162 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
3163 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
3164 to it.
3165
3166 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
3167 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
3168 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
3169 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
3170 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
3171 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
3172
3173 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
3174 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
3175 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
3176 You can probably access help-command via f1.
3177
3178 * Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
3179 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
3180 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
3181 causes it.
3182
3183 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
3184 call in the RFS server.
3185
3186 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
3187 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
3188 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
3189 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
3190
3191 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
3192
3193 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
3194 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
3195 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
3196 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
3197 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
3198 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
3199 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
3200
3201 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
3202
3203 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3204 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
3205 retrieving revision 1.2
3206 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3207 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
3208 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
3209 ***************
3210 *** 163,169 ****
3211 /*
3212 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3213 */
3214 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
3215 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3216 else
3217 {
3218 --- 166,172 ----
3219 /*
3220 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3221 */
3222 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
3223 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3224 else
3225 {
3226
3227 * Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3228
3229 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3230
3231 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3232 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3233
3234 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3235 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3236 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3237 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3238 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3239 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3240 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3241
3242 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3243 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3244 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3245 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3246 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3247 Lisp_Object *args;
3248 ...
3249 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3250 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3251 Lisp_Object *args;
3252 Lisp_Object tem;
3253 ...
3254 tem = args[i];
3255 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3256 causes the problem to go away.
3257 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3258 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3259
3260 * 68000 C compiler problems
3261
3262 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3263 These are some that have been observed.
3264
3265 ** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3266 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3267 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3268
3269 ** "cannot reclaim" error.
3270
3271 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3272 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3273 simpler expressions.
3274
3275 ** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3276
3277 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3278 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3279
3280 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3281
3282 lose (arg)
3283 struct foo arg;
3284 {
3285 test ((int *) arg.y);
3286 }
3287
3288 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3289 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3290 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3291
3292 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3293 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3294
3295 * C compilers lose on returning unions
3296
3297 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3298 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3299 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3300
3301 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3302 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3303
3304 \f
3305 Local variables:
3306 mode: outline
3307 paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3308 end: