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1 Known Problems with GNU Emacs
2
3 Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
4 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
5 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
6 See the end of the file for license conditions.
7
8
9 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
10 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing C-c C-t
11 and browsing through the outline headers. (See C-h m for help on
12 Outline mode.)
13
14 * Mule-UCS doesn't work in Emacs 23.
15
16 It's completely redundant now, as far as we know.
17
18 * Emacs startup failures
19
20 ** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
21
22 A typical error message might be something like
23
24 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
25
26 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
27 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
28 are:
29
30 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
31
32 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
33 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
34 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
35
36 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
37 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
38 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
39
40 ** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
41
42 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
43 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
44 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
45 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
46 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
47 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
48 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
49 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
50 not to work.
51
52 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
53 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
54 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
55 same directory where system header files are kept.
56
57 ** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
58
59 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
60 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
61 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
62 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
63 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
64 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
65
66 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
67 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
68 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
69 it constitutes a separate package.
70
71 ** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
72
73 The typical error message might be like this:
74
75 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
76
77 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
78 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
79 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
80 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
81 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
82 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
83 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
84
85 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
86 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
87
88 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
89 file.
90
91 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
92 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
93 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
94
95 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
96
97 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
98 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
99 load-path.
100
101 ** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
102
103 An example of such an error is:
104
105 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
106
107 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
108 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
109 present in load-path:
110
111 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
112
113 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
114 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
115 load-path.
116
117 ** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
118
119 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
120
121 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
122 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
123 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
124 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
125 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
126 /******************************************************************
127
128 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
129 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
130 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
131 XLCd lcd;
132 {
133 - char* begin;
134 - char* end;
135 + char* begin = NULL;
136 + char* end = NULL;
137 char* ret;
138 int i = 0;
139 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
140 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
141 }
142 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
143 if (ret != NULL) {
144 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
145 + if (begin != NULL) {
146 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
147 + } else {
148 + ret[0] = '\0';
149 + }
150 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
151 }
152 return ret;
153
154 ** Emacs crashes on startup after a glibc upgrade.
155
156 This is caused by a binary incompatible change to the malloc
157 implementation in glibc 2.5.90-22. As a result, Emacs binaries built
158 using prior versions of glibc crash when run under 2.5.90-22.
159
160 This problem was first seen in pre-release versions of Fedora 7, and
161 may be fixed in the final Fedora 7 release. To stop the crash from
162 happening, first try upgrading to the newest version of glibc; if this
163 does not work, rebuild Emacs with the same version of glibc that you
164 will run it under. For details, see
165
166 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=239344
167
168 * Crash bugs
169
170 ** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
171
172 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
173 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
174 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
175 happens to exist on your X server).
176
177 ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
178
179 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
180 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
181 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
182
183 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
184 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
185
186 ** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
187 a segmentation fault and core dump.
188
189 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
190 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
191
192 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
193
194 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
195 untar it :-).
196
197 ** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
198 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
199 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
200 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
201 older version.
202
203 ** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
204
205 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
206 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
207 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
208 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
209 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
210
211 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
212 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
213 terminfo when built.
214
215 ** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
216
217 If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
218 reported to prevent the crashes.
219
220 ** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
221
222 It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
223
224 This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
225 the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
226 flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
227 necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
228
229 On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
230 configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
231
232 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes when closing a display (x-close-connection).
233
234 This happens because of bugs in Gtk+. Gtk+ 2.10 seems to be OK. See bug
235 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
236
237 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ may loop forever if a display crashes.
238
239 This is related to the bug above. A scenario for this is when emacs is run
240 as a server, and an X frame is created. If the X server for the frame
241 crashes or exits unexpectedly and an attempt is made to create a new
242 frame on another X display, then a Gtk+ error happens in the emacs
243 server that results in an endless loop. This is not fixed in any known
244 Gtk+ version (2.14.4 being current).
245
246 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes on startup on Cygwin.
247
248 A typical error message is
249 ***MEMORY-ERROR***: emacs[5172]: GSlice: failed to allocate 504 bytes
250 (alignment: 512): Function not implemented
251
252 Emacs supplies its own malloc, but glib (part of Gtk+) calls memalign and on
253 Cygwin, that becomes the Cygwin supplied memalign. As malloc is not the
254 Cygwin malloc, the Cygwin memalign always returns ENOSYS. A fix for this
255 problem would be welcome.
256
257 * General runtime problems
258
259 ** Lisp problems
260
261 *** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
262
263 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
264 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
265 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
266 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
267
268 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
269 than the corresponding .el file.
270
271 *** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
272
273 These control the actions of Emacs.
274 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
275 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
276 "load" will search.
277
278 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
279 of them, then try again.
280
281 *** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
282
283 The error message might be something like this:
284
285 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
286
287 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
288 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
289 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
290 corrects that.
291
292 *** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
293
294 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
295 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
296 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
297
298 *** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
299 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
300 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
301 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
302
303 ** Keyboard problems
304
305 *** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
306
307 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
308 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
309 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
310 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
311 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
312 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
313
314 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
315 them to two different keys.
316
317 *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
318
319 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
320 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
321 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
322
323 *** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
324 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
325
326 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
327 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
328 another escape character in kermit. One user did
329
330 set escape-character 17
331
332 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
333
334 ** Mailers and other helper programs
335
336 *** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
337
338 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
339 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
340 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
341 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
342 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
343 old POP protocol.
344
345 *** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
346
347 RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
348 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
349 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
350
351 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
352 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
353 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
354 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
355 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
356 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
357 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
358
359 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
360 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
361 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
362 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
363 make install.
364
365 chgrp mail movemail
366 chmod 2755 movemail
367
368 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
369 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
370 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
371 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
372 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
373 directory copy is ineffective.
374
375 *** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
376
377 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
378 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
379
380 ** Problems with hostname resolution
381
382 *** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
383 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
384 *** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
385 *** Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
386
387 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
388 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
389 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
390 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
391
392 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
393 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
394
395 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
396 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
397
398 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
399 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
400 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
401 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
402 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
403 be careful not to lose the others.
404
405 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
406
407 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
408
409 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
410 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
411 again to say this:
412
413 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
414
415 *** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
416
417 For example, (system-name) returns some variation on
418 "localhost.localdomain", rather the name you were expecting.
419
420 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
421 (i.e. a name with at least one ".") either in /etc/hosts,
422 /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system calls for specifying
423 this.
424
425 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
426 mail-host-address to the value you want.
427
428 ** NFS and RFS
429
430 *** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
431 appear on disk.
432
433 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
434 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
435 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
436 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
437 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
438 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
439
440 *** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
441 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
442 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
443 causes it.
444
445 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
446 call in the RFS server.
447
448 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
449 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
450 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
451 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
452
453 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
454
455 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
456 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
457 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
458 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
459 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
460 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
461 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
462
463 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
464
465 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
466 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
467 retrieving revision 1.2
468 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
469 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
470 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
471 ***************
472 *** 163,169 ****
473 /*
474 * No return sent for close or fsync!
475 */
476 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
477 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
478 else
479 {
480 --- 166,172 ----
481 /*
482 * No return sent for close or fsync!
483 */
484 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
485 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
486 else
487 {
488
489 ** PSGML
490
491 *** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
492 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
493 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
494
495 *** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
496
497 PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
498 as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
499 of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
500 sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
501 HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
502 (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
503 (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
504
505 *** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
506 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
507 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
508 earlier versions.
509
510 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
511 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
512 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
513 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
514 (cond
515 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
516 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
517 + (insert-file-contents entity)
518 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
519 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
520 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
521
522 ** AUCTeX
523
524 You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
525 it.
526
527 *** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
528
529 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
530 these problems.
531
532 *** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
533
534 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
535 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
536
537 ** PCL-CVS
538
539 *** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit.
540
541 When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examined
542 directory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous message
543 from which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committed
544 files. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer are
545 not updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines are
546 added to the top-level directory.
547
548 This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS
549 1.12.10 or newer to fix this problem.
550
551 ** Miscellaneous problems
552
553 *** Emacs uses 100% of CPU time
554
555 This is a known problem with some versions of the Semantic package.
556 The solution is to upgrade Semantic to version 2.0pre4 (distributed
557 with CEDET 1.0pre4) or later.
558
559 *** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
560
561 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
562 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
563 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
564
565 *** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
566 terminal type.
567
568 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
569 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
570 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
571 emulates.
572
573 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
574 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
575 it only if it is undefined.
576
577 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
578
579 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
580 happen in a non-login shell.
581
582 *** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
583
584 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
585 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
586 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
587 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
588
589 if ($?EMACS) then
590 if ("$EMACS" =~ /*) then
591 unset edit
592 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
593 endif
594 endif
595
596 *** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
597
598 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
599 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
600 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
601
602 127.0.0.1 localhost
603 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
604
605 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
606
607 *** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
608
609 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
610 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
611 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
612 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
613 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
614 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
615
616 update-alternatives --config ftp
617
618 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
619
620 *** JPEG images aren't displayed.
621
622 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
623 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
624 correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
625 against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
626
627 *** Dired is very slow.
628
629 This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
630 time. Possible reasons for this include:
631
632 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
633 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
634
635 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
636
637 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
638
639 To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
640 `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
641 invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
642 (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
643
644 *** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
645 under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
646
647 *** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
648
649 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
650 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
651 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
652 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
653
654 *** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
655
656 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
657 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
658 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
659
660 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
661
662 *** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
663 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
664 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
665 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
666 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
667
668 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
669 process invokes Emacs several times.
670
671 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
672 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
673 can be found.
674
675 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
676 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
677 specified run-time search path in the executable.
678
679 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
680 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
681 backtraces like this:
682
683 (dbx) where
684 0 strcmp(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) ["/xlv22/ficus-jan23/work/irix/lib/libc/libc_n32_M3_ns/strings/strcmp.s":35, 0xfb7e480]
685 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
686 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
687 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
688 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
689 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
690 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
691 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
692 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
693
694 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
695 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
696 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
697 to work around the problem.
698
699 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
700
701 *** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
702 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
703
704 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
705 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
706 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
707
708 *** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
709
710 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
711 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
712 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
713 support for 8-bit characters.
714
715 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
716 this at your shell's prompt:
717
718 ispell -vv
719
720 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
721 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
722 does not.
723
724 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
725 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
726 Then rebuild the speller.
727
728 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
729 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
730
731 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
732 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
733 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
734 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
735 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
736
737 If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
738 you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
739 can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
740 in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
741
742 * Runtime problems related to font handling
743
744 ** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
745
746 *** This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
747 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
748 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with Gtk+ will then use the
749 newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily fixed by
750 stopping the application that has the error (it can be Emacs or any
751 other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1, and then start the
752 application again. If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting
753 doesn't help, the application with problem must be recompiled with the
754 same version of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE,
755 it is sufficient to recompile Qt.
756
757 *** Some fonts have a missing glyph and no default character. This is
758 known to occur for character number 160 (no-break space) in some
759 fonts, such as Lucida but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte
760 and Latin-1 version of this character to display a space.
761
762 *** Some of the fonts called for in your fontset may not exist on your
763 X server.
764
765 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
766 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
767 many different fonts, collected into a fontset. You can remedy the
768 problem by installing additional fonts.
769
770 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
771 display all the characters Emacs supports. The etl-unicode collection
772 of fonts (available from <URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/fonts/> and
773 <URL:ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/mirror/X.Org/contrib/fonts/>) includes
774 fonts that can display many Unicode characters; they can also be used
775 by ps-print and ps-mule to print Unicode characters.
776
777 ** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
778
779 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution
780 or the etl-unicode collection (see above).
781
782 ** Under X, an unexpected monospace font is used as the default font.
783
784 When compiled with XFT, Emacs tries to use a default font named
785 "monospace". This is a "virtual font", which the operating system
786 (Fontconfig) redirects to a suitable font such as DejaVu Sans Mono.
787 On some systems, there exists a font that is actually named Monospace,
788 which takes over the virtual font. This is considered an operating
789 system bug; see
790
791 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2008-10/msg00696.html
792
793 If you encounter this problem, set the default font to a specific font
794 in your .Xresources or initialization file. For instance, you can put
795 the following in your .Xresources:
796
797 Emacs.font: DejaVu Sans Mono 12
798
799 ** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it should.
800
801 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller than
802 the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that lines do not
803 overlap.
804
805 ** Loading fonts is very slow.
806
807 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
808 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
809 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
810 "fonts.scale".
811
812 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
813 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
814
815 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
816 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
817 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
818
819 ** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
820
821 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
822 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
823 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
824 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
825 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
826 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
827 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
828 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
829 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
830 to the end of a very large buffer.
831
832 Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
833 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
834 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
835 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
836
837 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
838 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
839 fontification by setting the variable
840 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
841 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
842
843 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
844 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
845
846 ** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
847 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
848
849 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
850 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
851 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
852
853 ** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
854
855 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
856 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
857 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
858 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
859
860 A workaround for this is to add something like
861
862 emacs.waitForWM: false
863
864 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
865 frame's parameter list, like this:
866
867 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
868
869 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
870
871 ** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
872
873 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
874 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
875 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package prior to version 3.0.17.
876 To circumvent this problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties
877 to nil in your `.emacs'.
878
879 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
880 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
881 property.
882
883 ** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
884
885 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
886 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
887 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
888 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
889 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
890
891 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
892 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
893
894 ** Subscript/superscript text in TeX is hard to read.
895
896 If `tex-fontify-script' is non-nil, tex-mode displays
897 subscript/superscript text in the faces subscript/superscript, which
898 are smaller than the normal font and lowered/raised. With some fonts,
899 nested superscripts (say) can be hard to read. Switching to a
900 different font, or changing your antialiasing setting (on an LCD
901 screen), can both make the problem disappear. Alternatively, customize
902 the following variables: tex-font-script-display (how much to
903 lower/raise); tex-suscript-height-ratio (how much smaller than
904 normal); tex-suscript-height-minimum (minimum height).
905
906 * Internationalization problems
907
908 ** M-{ does not work on a Spanish PC keyboard.
909
910 Many Spanish keyboards seem to ignore that combination. Emacs can't
911 do anything about it.
912
913 ** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
914
915 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
916 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
917 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
918 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
919 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
920 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
921 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
922 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
923 include in the fontset spec:
924
925 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
926 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
927 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
928
929 ** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
930
931 Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in the
932 ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts of
933 CJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets:
934
935 GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601
936
937 The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on by
938 default). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacs
939 charset is decided by the current language environment. For instance,
940 in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312.
941
942 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
943 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
944 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
945 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
946 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
947 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
948 information.
949
950 ** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
951
952 Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
953 library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
954 following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
955 though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
956 distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
957
958 --- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
959 +++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
960 @@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
961
962 (mapcar
963 (lambda (x)
964 - (mapcar
965 - (lambda (y)
966 - (mucs-define-coding-system
967 - (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
968 - (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
969 - (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
970 - (cdr x)))
971 + (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
972 + ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
973 + ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
974 + ;; system definitions.
975 + (let ((y (cadr x)))
976 + (mucs-define-coding-system
977 + (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
978 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
979 + (mapcar
980 + (lambda (y)
981 + (mucs-define-coding-system
982 + (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
983 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
984 + (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
985 + (cdr x)))
986 `((utf-8
987 (utf-8-unix
988 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
989
990 Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
991 Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
992
993 ** Mule-UCS compilation problem.
994
995 Emacs of old versions and XEmacs byte-compile the form `(progn progn
996 ...)' the same way as `(progn ...)', but Emacs of version 21.3 and the
997 later process that form just as interpreter does, that is, as `progn'
998 variable reference. Apply the following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 to
999 make it compiled by the latest Emacs.
1000
1001 --- mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 00:42:23 -0000 1.1.1.1
1002 +++ mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 01:31:51 -0000 1.3
1003 @@ -639,10 +639,14 @@
1004 (mucs-notify-embedment 'mucs-ccl-required name)
1005 (setq ccl-pgm-list (cdr ccl-pgm-list)))
1006 ; (message "MCCLREGFIN:%S" result)
1007 - `(progn
1008 - (setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
1009 - (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
1010 - ,@result)))
1011 + ;; The only way the function is used in this package is included
1012 + ;; in `mucs-package-definition-end-hook' value, where it must
1013 + ;; return (possibly empty) *list* of forms. Do this. Do not rely
1014 + ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)'
1015 + ;; form.
1016 + `((setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
1017 + (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
1018 + ,@result)))
1019
1020 ;;; Add hook for embedding translation informations to a package.
1021 (add-hook 'mucs-package-definition-end-hook
1022
1023 ** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
1024
1025 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
1026 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
1027 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
1028 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
1029 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
1030 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
1031
1032 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
1033
1034 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
1035
1036 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
1037 problem.
1038
1039 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
1040 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
1041 `xset fp rehash'.
1042
1043 ** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
1044
1045 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
1046 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
1047 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
1048 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
1049 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
1050
1051 ** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1052
1053 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1054 (standard-display-european t)
1055 That should be changed to
1056 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1057
1058 * X runtime problems
1059
1060 ** X keyboard problems
1061
1062 *** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
1063
1064 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
1065 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
1066 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
1067 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
1068
1069 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
1070
1071 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
1072
1073 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
1074 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
1075 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
1076
1077 *** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
1078
1079 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
1080
1081 *** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method).
1082
1083 Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program
1084 which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users
1085 from using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'.
1086
1087 One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' file
1088 which can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory.
1089 However, that requires root access.
1090
1091 Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources.
1092
1093 Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.
1094
1095 The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx
1096 (Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. If
1097 you want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitx
1098 by another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or be
1099 accustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'.
1100
1101 *** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1102
1103 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1104 for character composition.
1105
1106 *** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1107
1108 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1109 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1110 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1111 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1112 purposes.
1113
1114 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1115 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1116
1117 *** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1118
1119 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1120 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1121 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1122 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1123 change this.
1124
1125 *** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
1126
1127 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
1128 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
1129 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
1130
1131 *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
1132 directly with an X server.
1133
1134 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
1135 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
1136 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
1137 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
1138 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
1139 have made the key binding correctly.
1140
1141 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
1142 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
1143 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
1144 default.
1145
1146 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
1147
1148 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
1149 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
1150
1151 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1152 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1153 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1154 modifier bit not otherwise used.
1155
1156 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1157 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1158 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1159 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
1160
1161 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1162 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
1163
1164 ** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
1165
1166 *** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM.
1167
1168 This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later
1169 is running. If gnome-settings-daemon is not running, Emacs receives
1170 input through XIM without any problem. Furthermore, this seems only
1171 to happen in *.UTF-8 locales; zh_CN.GB2312 and zh_CN.GBK locales, for
1172 example, work fine. A bug report has been filed in the Gnome
1173 bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357032
1174
1175 *** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
1176
1177 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1178 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1179 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1180 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1181 been filed.
1182
1183 *** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1184 or messed up.
1185
1186 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1187 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1188 background.
1189
1190 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1191 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1192 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1193 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1194 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1195
1196 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1197 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1198 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1199 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1200 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1201 present or commented out:
1202
1203 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1204 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1205 Emacs*Foreground
1206 Emacs*Background
1207
1208 It is also reported that a bug in the gtk-engines-qt engine can cause this if
1209 Emacs is compiled with Gtk+.
1210 The bug is fixed in version 0.7 or newer of gtk-engines-qt.
1211
1212 *** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1213
1214 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1215 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1216 of klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections,
1217 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1218 while, Emacs may print a message:
1219
1220 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1221
1222 A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
1223 comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
1224
1225 *** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1226
1227 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1228 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1229 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1230 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1231
1232 *** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1233 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1234 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1235 problem disappears.
1236
1237 *** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1238 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1239 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1240 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1241 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1242 used with neXtaw at run time.
1243
1244 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1245 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1246 built Emacs with.
1247
1248 *** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
1249
1250 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1251 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1252 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1253 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
1254
1255 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1256 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
1257
1258 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1259 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1260 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
1261
1262 *** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
1263
1264 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1265 emulation for which it is set up.
1266
1267 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
1268 LessTif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
1269 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1270 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1271 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1272 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1273 menu placement.
1274
1275 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1276 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1277 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1278 developers.
1279
1280 *** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1281
1282 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1283
1284 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1285
1286 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1287 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1288 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1289 the resource prevents the problem.
1290
1291 ** General X problems
1292
1293 *** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1294
1295 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1296 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1297 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1298 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1299
1300 Here's how to do this:
1301
1302 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1303
1304 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1305 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1306 to normal, do
1307
1308 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1309
1310 *** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
1311
1312 The messages might say something like this:
1313
1314 Unable to load color "grey95"
1315
1316 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
1317
1318 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
1319
1320 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1321 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1322 resources to load all the colors it needs.
1323
1324 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
1325
1326 "undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the
1327 X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where
1328 X expects to find it.
1329
1330 *** Improving performance with slow X connections.
1331
1332 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1333 be carried out at the same time:
1334
1335 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1336 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1337 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1338 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1339 package.
1340
1341 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
1342 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the
1343 following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only
1344 after the the initial frame is displayed:
1345
1346 (scroll-bar-mode -1)
1347 (menu-bar-mode -1)
1348 (tool-bar-mode -1)
1349
1350 For still quicker startup, put these X resources in your .Xdefaults
1351 file:
1352
1353 Emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
1354 Emacs.menuBar: off
1355 Emacs.toolBar: off
1356
1357 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1358 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
1359
1360 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1361 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1362 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1363 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1364 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
1365 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a separate
1366 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1367 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1368 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1369 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1370 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
1371
1372 5) If copying and killing is slow, try to disable the interaction with the
1373 native system's clipboard by adding these lines to your .emacs file:
1374 (setq interprogram-cut-function nil)
1375 (setq interprogram-paste-function nil)
1376
1377 *** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1378
1379 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1380 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1381 likely to cause it.
1382
1383 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1384
1385 *** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1386
1387 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1388 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1389
1390 *** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
1391
1392 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1393 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1394 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1395 the Files menu).
1396
1397 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1398 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1399 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1400 workaround can be found.
1401
1402 *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1403 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
1404
1405 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1406 emacs*Cursor: black
1407 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1408 that isn't a color.)
1409
1410 The fix is to correct your X resources.
1411
1412 *** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
1413
1414 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1415 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1416 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1417 font.
1418
1419 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1420 your font path, like this:
1421
1422 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
1423
1424 *** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
1425
1426 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
1427
1428 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
1429
1430 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1431 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1432 want, rewrite the resource.
1433
1434 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1435 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1436 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
1437
1438 *** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1439 *** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
1440
1441 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1442 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1443 the environment.
1444
1445 *** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
1446
1447 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1448 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1449 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
1450
1451 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1452 whether this problem is present on a given system.
1453
1454 *** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
1455
1456 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1457 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1458 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1459 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
1460
1461 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1462 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1463 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
1464
1465 The easy way to do this is to put
1466
1467 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
1468
1469 in your site-init.el file.
1470
1471 *** Prevent double pastes in X
1472
1473 The problem: a region, such as a command, is pasted twice when you copy
1474 it with your mouse from GNU Emacs to an xterm or an RXVT shell in X.
1475 The solution: try the following in your X configuration file,
1476 /etc/X11/xorg.conf This should enable both PS/2 and USB mice for
1477 single copies. You do not need any other drivers or options.
1478
1479 Section "InputDevice"
1480 Identifier "Generic Mouse"
1481 Driver "mousedev"
1482 Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
1483 EndSection
1484
1485 * Runtime problems on character terminals
1486
1487 ** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
1488
1489 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1490 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1491 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1492 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1493 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1494 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1495 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1496 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
1497
1498 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
1499
1500 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1501 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1502 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
1503
1504 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1505 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1506 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
1507 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1508 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1509 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
1510
1511 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1512 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1513 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1514 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1515 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1516 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1517 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1518 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1519 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
1520
1521 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1522 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1523 codes. You might as well try it.
1524
1525 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1526 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1527 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1528 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1529 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1530 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1531 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1532 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
1533
1534 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1535 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1536 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1537 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1538 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1539 control handling.)
1540
1541 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1542 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1543 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1544 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1545 other control characters are already used by emacs.
1546
1547 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1548 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1549 order to continue.
1550
1551 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1552 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1553 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1554 automatically. Here is an example:
1555
1556 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1557
1558 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1559 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1560 manually.
1561
1562 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1563 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1564 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1565 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1566 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1567 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1568 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1569 of inferior systems.
1570
1571 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
1572
1573 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1574 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1575 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1576 that wants to use flow control.
1577
1578 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1579 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1580 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
1581
1582 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1583 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1584 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
1585
1586 ** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
1587
1588 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1589 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1590 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
1591
1592 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1593 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1594 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1595 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1596 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1597 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1598 There are several possibilities:
1599
1600 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
1601
1602 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1603 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
1604
1605 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1606 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1607 by termcap.
1608
1609 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1610 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1611 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1612 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1613 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1614 tested on many kinds of terminals.
1615
1616 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
1617
1618 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1619 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1620 for certain terminals.
1621
1622 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1623 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
1624
1625 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1626 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
1627
1628 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
1629
1630 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1631 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1632 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1633 control on the local system.
1634
1635 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1636 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1637 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1638 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
1639
1640 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1641 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1642 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
1643
1644 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1645 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1646 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1647 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
1648
1649 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1650
1651 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1652 info.
1653
1654 ** Output from Control-V is slow.
1655
1656 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1657 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1658 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1659 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1660 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1661 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
1662
1663 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1664 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1665 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1666 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1667 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1668 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1669 time as the operations really take.
1670
1671 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1672 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1673 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1674 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1675 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1676 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1677 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1678 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1679 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1680 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
1681
1682 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1683 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1684 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1685 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1686 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1687 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1688 `cm' string.
1689
1690 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1691 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1692 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
1693
1694 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1695 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
1696
1697 ** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
1698
1699 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1700 after a day or two.
1701
1702 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1703 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1704 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1705 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1706 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1707 to it.
1708
1709 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1710 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1711 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1712 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1713 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1714 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
1715
1716 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1717 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1718 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1719 You can probably access help-command via f1.
1720
1721 ** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
1722
1723 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1724 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1725 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1726 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1727 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1728 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1729 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1730 "colors".
1731
1732 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1733 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1734 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1735 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1736 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1737 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1738 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1739 capability).
1740
1741 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1742 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1743 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1744 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
1745
1746 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1747 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1748 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1749 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1750 emulator.
1751
1752 Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line
1753 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1754 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1755 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
1756
1757 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1758 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1759 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1760 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1761 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1762 `global-font-lock-mode'.
1763
1764 * Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
1765
1766 ** GNU/Linux
1767
1768 *** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted.
1769
1770 There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs to
1771 read corrupted process output.
1772
1773 *** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption.
1774
1775 If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupted
1776 due to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc.
1777
1778 To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it
1779 executable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name of
1780 the script:
1781
1782 #!/bin/bash
1783 exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
1784 exec ssh "$@"
1785
1786 *** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1787 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1788
1789 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1790 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1791 known to work.
1792
1793 *** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1794 the Meta key stops working.
1795
1796 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1797 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1798 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1799 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1800 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1801 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1802 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1803
1804 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1805 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1806 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1807 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1808 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1809 modifier:
1810
1811 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1812
1813 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1814 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1815
1816 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1817
1818 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1819 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1820 keys can serve as Meta.
1821
1822 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1823 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1824
1825 *** GNU/Linux: slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1826
1827 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1828 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1829
1830 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1831 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1832 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1833 networked and non-networked machines.
1834
1835 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1836
1837 **** Networked Case.
1838
1839 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1840 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1841 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1842
1843 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
1844
1845 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1846 lines:
1847
1848 order hosts, bind
1849 multi on
1850
1851 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1852 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1853 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1854 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1855
1856 **** Non-Networked Case.
1857
1858 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1859 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1860 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1861 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1862 file is not necessary with this approach.
1863
1864 *** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
1865
1866 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1867 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1868 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1869 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1870 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1871 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1872 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1873 always blinks.
1874
1875 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1876 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1877 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1878 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1879 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1880 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
1881
1882 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1883 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1884 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1885 produce a modified terminfo entry.
1886
1887 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1888 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
1889
1890 *** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1891
1892 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1893 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1894 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1895 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1896
1897 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1898
1899 ** FreeBSD
1900
1901 *** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1902 directories that have the +t bit.
1903
1904 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1905 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1906 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1907 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1908
1909 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1910 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1911
1912 *** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
1913
1914 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1915 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1916 current keymap to a file with the command
1917
1918 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
1919
1920 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1921 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1922 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1923 to look like this
1924
1925 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
1926
1927 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
1928
1929 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
1930
1931 ** HP-UX
1932
1933 *** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
1934
1935 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
1936
1937 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1938 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1939 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1940 but tty is giving it back 3.
1941
1942 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1943 word:
1944
1945 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
1946
1947 should be changed to:
1948
1949 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
1950
1951 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1952 and into .login.
1953
1954 *** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
1955
1956 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1957 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1958 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1959 value is just ten seconds.
1960
1961 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
1962
1963 *** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1964 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1965
1966 This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1967 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1968 configures the X server.
1969
1970 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1971 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1972 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1973 EOF
1974
1975 xmodmap - << EOF
1976 clear mod1
1977 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1978 add mod1 = Meta_L
1979 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1980 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1981 EOF
1982
1983 *** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1984 Emacs built with Motif.
1985
1986 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1987 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1988
1989 *** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
1990
1991 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1992 rights, containing this text:
1993
1994 --------------------------------
1995 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1996 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1997 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1998 EOF
1999
2000 xmodmap - << EOF
2001 clear mod1
2002 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
2003 add mod1 = Meta_L
2004 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
2005 add mod2 = Mode_switch
2006 EOF
2007 --------------------------------
2008
2009 *** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
2010
2011 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
2012
2013 ** AIX
2014
2015 *** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
2016
2017 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2018 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2019
2020 *** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
2021
2022 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
2023
2024 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
2025 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
2026
2027 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
2028
2029 *** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
2030 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
2031 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
2032 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
2033
2034 *** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
2035
2036 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
2037 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
2038 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
2039 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
2040
2041 *** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
2042 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
2043
2044 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
2045 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
2046 Definitions" to make them defined.
2047
2048 ** Solaris
2049
2050 We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
2051 section on legacy systems.
2052
2053 *** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2054
2055 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2056 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2057
2058 *** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2059
2060 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2061 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2062 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2063 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2064
2065 *** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
2066
2067 We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
2068 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
2069 makes the problem stop:
2070
2071 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
2072 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
2073 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
2074 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
2075
2076 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
2077 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
2078
2079 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
2080 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
2081 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
2082
2083 *** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
2084
2085 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
2086 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
2087
2088 *** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
2089 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
2090
2091 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
2092
2093 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
2094
2095 *** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
2096 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
2097
2098 You can fix this by editing the file:
2099
2100 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
2101
2102 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
2103
2104 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2105
2106 that should read:
2107
2108 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2109
2110 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
2111
2112 *** On Solaris, Emacs fails to set menu-bar-update-hook on startup, with error
2113 "Error in menu-bar-update-hook: (error Point before start of properties)".
2114 This seems to be a GCC optimization bug that occurs for GCC 4.1.2 (-g
2115 and -g -O2) and GCC 4.2.3 (-g -O and -g -O2). You can fix this by
2116 compiling with GCC 4.2.3 or CC 5.7, with no optimizations.
2117
2118 ** Irix
2119
2120 *** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
2121
2122 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
2123
2124 *** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
2125
2126 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2127 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2128 to allocate ptys reliably.
2129
2130 * Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
2131
2132 ** PATH can contain unexpanded environment variables
2133
2134 Old releases of TCC (version 9) and 4NT (up to version 8) do not correctly
2135 expand App Paths entries of type REG_EXPAND_SZ. When Emacs is run from TCC
2136 and such an entry exists for emacs.exe, exec-path will contain the
2137 unexpanded entry. This has been fixed in TCC 10. For more information,
2138 see bug#2062.
2139
2140 ** Setting w32-pass-rwindow-to-system and w32-pass-lwindow-to-system to nil
2141 does not prevent the Start menu from popping up when the left or right
2142 ``Windows'' key is pressed.
2143
2144 This was reported to happen when XKeymacs is installed. At least with
2145 XKeymacs Version 3.47, deactivating XKeymacs when Emacs is active is
2146 not enough to avoid its messing with the keyboard input. Exiting
2147 XKeymacs completely is reported to solve the problem.
2148
2149 ** Windows 95 and networking.
2150
2151 To support server sockets, Emacs 22.1 loads ws2_32.dll. If this file
2152 is missing, all Emacs networking features are disabled.
2153
2154 Old versions of Windows 95 may not have the required DLL. To use
2155 Emacs' networking features on Windows 95, you must install the
2156 "Windows Socket 2" update available from MicroSoft's support Web.
2157
2158 ** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
2159
2160 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
2161 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
2162 problem.
2163
2164 ** Emacs crashes when opening a file with a UNC path and rails-mode is loaded.
2165
2166 Loading rails-mode seems to interfere with UNC path handling. This has been
2167 reported as a bug against both Emacs and rails-mode, so look for an updated
2168 rails-mode that avoids this crash, or avoid using UNC paths if using
2169 rails-mode.
2170
2171 ** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 22.3
2172
2173 M-x term does not work on MS-Windows. TTY emulation on Windows is
2174 undocumented, and programs such as stty which are used on posix platforms
2175 to control tty emulation do not exist for native windows terminals.
2176
2177 Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameter
2178 with a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems.
2179 Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control over
2180 which font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character,
2181 use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset.
2182
2183 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
2184 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
2185 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
2186 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
2187 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
2188 pop-up menu interaction.
2189
2190 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
2191 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
2192
2193 When "ClearType" method is selected as the "method to smooth edges of
2194 screen fonts" (in Display Properties, Appearance tab, under
2195 "Effects"), there are various problems related to display of
2196 characters: Bold fonts can be hard to read, small portions of some
2197 characters could appear chopped, etc. This happens because, under
2198 ClearType, characters are drawn outside their advertised bounding box.
2199 Emacs 21 disabled the use of ClearType, whereas Emacs 22 allows it and
2200 has some code to enlarge the width of the bounding box. Apparently,
2201 this display feature needs more changes to get it 100% right. A
2202 workaround is to disable ClearType.
2203
2204 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
2205 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
2206 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
2207 after moving back into it.
2208
2209 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
2210 not as severely as in 21.1.
2211
2212 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
2213 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
2214
2215 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. However, some
2216 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
2217 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
2218 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make these
2219 input methods work with Emacs, set the keyboard coding system to the
2220 appropriate value after you activate the Windows input method. For
2221 example, if you activate the Hebrew input method, type this:
2222
2223 C-x RET k hebrew-iso-8bit RET
2224
2225 (Emacs ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up
2226 the appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do
2227 that yet.) In addition, to use these Windows input methods, you
2228 should set your "Language for non-Unicode programs" (on Windows XP,
2229 this is on the Advanced tab of Regional Settings) to the language of
2230 the input method.
2231
2232 To bind keys that produce non-ASCII characters with modifiers, you
2233 must specify raw byte codes. For instance, if you want to bind
2234 META-a-grave to a command, you need to specify this in your `~/.emacs':
2235
2236 (global-set-key [?\M-\340] ...)
2237
2238 The above example is for the Latin-1 environment where the byte code
2239 of the encoded a-grave is 340 octal. For other environments, use the
2240 encoding appropriate to that environment.
2241
2242 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
2243 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
2244 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
2245 library function.
2246
2247 The function set-time-zone-rule gives incorrect results for many
2248 non-US timezones. This is due to over-simplistic handling of
2249 daylight savings switchovers by the Windows libraries.
2250
2251 Files larger than 4GB cause overflow in the size (represented as a
2252 32-bit integer) reported by `file-attributes'. This affects Dired as
2253 well, since the Windows port uses a Lisp emulation of `ls' that relies
2254 on `file-attributes'.
2255
2256 Sound playing is not supported with the `:data DATA' key-value pair.
2257 You _must_ use the `:file FILE' method.
2258
2259 ** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
2260
2261 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
2262 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
2263 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
2264 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
2265 or disable it in the "Regional and Language Options" applet of the
2266 Control Panel. (The exact sequence of mouse clicks in the "Regional
2267 and Language Options" applet needed to find the key combination that
2268 changes the keyboard layout depends on your Windows version; for XP,
2269 in the Languages tab, click "Details" and then "Key Settings".)
2270
2271 ** Cygwin build of Emacs hangs after rebasing Cygwin DLLs
2272
2273 Usually, on Cygwin, one needs to rebase the DLLs if an application
2274 aborts with a message like this:
2275
2276 C:\cygwin\bin\python.exe: *** unable to remap C:\cygwin\bin\cygssl.dll to
2277 same address as parent(0xDF0000) != 0xE00000
2278
2279 However, since Cygwin DLL 1.5.17 was released, after such rebasing,
2280 Emacs hangs.
2281
2282 This was reported to happen for Emacs 21.2 and also for the pretest of
2283 Emacs 22.1 on Cygwin.
2284
2285 To work around this, build Emacs like this:
2286
2287 LDFLAGS='-Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base' ./configure
2288 make LD='$(CC)'
2289 make LD='$(CC)' install
2290
2291 This produces an Emacs binary that is independent of rebasing.
2292
2293 Note that you _must_ use LD='$(CC)' in the last two commands above, to
2294 prevent GCC from passing the "--image-base 0x20000000" option to the
2295 linker, which is what it does by default. That option produces an
2296 Emacs binary with the base address 0x20000000, which will cause Emacs
2297 to hang after Cygwin DLLs are rebased.
2298
2299 ** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
2300
2301 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
2302 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
2303 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
2304 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
2305 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
2306
2307 ** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2308
2309 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
2310 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
2311 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
2312 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
2313 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
2314 confuses ange-ftp.
2315
2316 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2317 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2318 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2319 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2320 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2321 client's executable. For example:
2322
2323 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
2324
2325 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2326 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
2327
2328 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
2329
2330 ** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
2331
2332 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2333 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
2334
2335 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2336 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2337 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2338 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2339 has):
2340
2341 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2342 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2343 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2344 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
2345
2346 ** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2347
2348 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2349 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2350 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2351 work when an antivirus package is installed.
2352
2353 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2354 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2355 or disable it entirely.
2356
2357 ** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
2358
2359 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2360 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2361 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2362 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2363 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2364 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2365 generic mouse driver might help.
2366
2367 ** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
2368
2369 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2370 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2371 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2372 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
2373
2374 ** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2375 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2376 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2377 seen.
2378
2379 ** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2380 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
2381
2382 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
2383
2384 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2385 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2386 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2387 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2388 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2389 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
2390
2391 ** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
2392
2393 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2394 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2395 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2396 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
2397
2398 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2399 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2400 problem lies in the X-server settings.
2401
2402 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2403 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2404 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2405 selection".
2406
2407 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2408 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2409 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2410 here.
2411
2412 * Build-time problems
2413
2414 ** Configuration
2415
2416 *** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
2417
2418 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2419 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2420 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
2421
2422 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2423 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2424 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2425 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2426 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2427 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
2428
2429 *** `configure' warns ``accepted by the compiler, rejected by the preprocessor''.
2430
2431 This indicates a mismatch between the C compiler and preprocessor that
2432 configure is using. For example, on Solaris 10 trying to use
2433 CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc (the Sun Studio compiler) together with
2434 CPP=/usr/ccs/lib/cpp can result in errors of this form (you may also
2435 see the error ``"/usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h", line 500: undefined control'').
2436
2437 The solution is to tell configure to use the correct C preprocessor
2438 for your C compiler (CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E" in the above
2439 example).
2440
2441 *** `configure' fails with ``"junk.c", line 660: invalid input token: 8.elc''
2442
2443 The final stage of the Emacs configure process uses the C preprocessor
2444 to generate the Makefiles. Errors of this form can occur if the C
2445 preprocessor inserts extra whitespace into its output. The solution
2446 is to find the switches that stop your preprocessor from inserting extra
2447 whitespace, add them to CPPFLAGS, and re-run configure. For example,
2448 this error can occur on Solaris 10 when using the Sun Studio compiler
2449 ``Sun C 5.8'' with its preprocessor CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E".
2450 The relevant switch in this case is "-Xs" (``compile assuming
2451 (pre-ANSI) K & R C style code'').
2452
2453 ** Compilation
2454
2455 *** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
2456
2457 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
2458 (Red Hat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
2459 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2460 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2461 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2462 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2463 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2464 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
2465
2466 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2467 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2468 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2469 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
2470
2471 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2472 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2473 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2474 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2475 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2476 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2477 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2478 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2479 `/etc/auto.home'.
2480
2481 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2482 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2483 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2484 to work around the problem.
2485
2486 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2487 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2488 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2489 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
2490
2491 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
2492
2493 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
2494
2495 *** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
2496
2497 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2498 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2499 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2500 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2501 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2502 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2503 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2504 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2505 variables).
2506
2507 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2508 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2509 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2510 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2511 run the script like this:
2512
2513 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
2514
2515 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2516 the script).
2517
2518 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2519 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
2520
2521 *** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2522 *** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2523
2524 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2525 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2526 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2527 configure script.
2528
2529 *** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2530
2531 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2532 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2533 Emacs's configure script.
2534
2535 *** Building a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit GNU/Linux architecture.
2536
2537 First ensure that the necessary 32-bit system libraries and include
2538 files are installed. Then use:
2539
2540 env CC="gcc -m32" ./configure --build=i386-linux-gnu \
2541 --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
2542
2543 (using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system).
2544
2545 *** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC versions
2546
2547 Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
2548 reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time. In
2549 addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
2550 info. Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
2551 compiling Emacs. GCC versions 4.0.3, 4.0.4, 4.1.1, and 4.1.2
2552 reportedly build a working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend
2553 these GCC versions. Note that these versions of GCC, 4.0.3, 4.0.4,
2554 4.1.1, and 4.1.2, are currently the _only_ versions known to succeed
2555 in building Emacs (as of v22.1).
2556
2557 *** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
2558
2559 Emacs may not build using some Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2560 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2561 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2562 __MSVCRT__, like so:
2563
2564 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
2565
2566 *** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
2567
2568 Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2569 to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2570 fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
2571
2572 *** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
2573
2574 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2575 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2576 patch to assert.h should solve this:
2577
2578 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2579 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2580 ***************
2581 *** 41,47 ****
2582 /*
2583 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2584 */
2585 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
2586
2587 #else /* debugging enabled */
2588
2589 --- 41,47 ----
2590 /*
2591 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2592 */
2593 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
2594
2595 #else /* debugging enabled */
2596
2597
2598 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Visual Studio 2005 fails.
2599
2600 Microsoft no longer ships the single threaded version of the C library
2601 with their compiler, and the multithreaded static library is missing
2602 some functions that Microsoft have deemed non-threadsafe. The
2603 dynamically linked C library has all the functions, but there is a
2604 conflict between the versions of malloc in the DLL and in Emacs, which
2605 is not resolvable due to the way Windows does dynamic linking.
2606
2607 We recommend the use of the MingW port of GCC for compiling Emacs, as
2608 not only does it not suffer these problems, but it is also Free
2609 software like Emacs.
2610
2611 ** Linking
2612
2613 *** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2614 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
2615
2616 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2617 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2618 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2619 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2620 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2621 link stage.
2622
2623 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
2624
2625 make CC=gcc
2626
2627 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2628 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
2629
2630 *** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
2631
2632 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2633 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2634 workaround/fix is:
2635
2636 cd /lib
2637 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2638 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2639
2640 *** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2641 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2642 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2643
2644 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2645 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2646 you build Emacs:
2647
2648 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2649 chmod 664 libIM.a
2650 ranlib libIM.a
2651
2652 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2653 Makefile).
2654
2655 *** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2656
2657 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2658
2659 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2660
2661 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2662
2663 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2664 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2665
2666 *** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2667
2668 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2669
2670 *** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
2671
2672 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2673 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2674 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2675 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2676 does not work with this version of ncurses.
2677
2678 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
2679
2680 ** Bootstrapping
2681
2682 Bootstrapping (compiling the .el files) is normally only necessary
2683 with CVS builds, since the .elc files are pre-compiled in releases.
2684
2685 *** "No rule to make target" with Ubuntu 8.04 make 3.81-3build1
2686
2687 Compiling the lisp files fails at random places, complaining:
2688 "No rule to make target `/path/to/some/lisp.elc'".
2689 The causes of this problem are not understood. Using GNU make 3.81 compiled
2690 from source, rather than the Ubuntu version, worked. See Bug#327,821.
2691
2692 ** Dumping
2693
2694 *** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
2695
2696 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Red Hat Fedora Core
2697 1 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
2698 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs tries
2699 to handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, these
2700 instructions can be useful.
2701 The work-around explained here is not enough on Fedora Core 4 (and possible
2702 newer). Read the next item.
2703
2704 Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
2705 x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
2706 workaround is known.
2707
2708 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
2709
2710 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2711
2712 It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
2713 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
2714 associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
2715
2716 echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2717
2718 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2719 execution of this command:
2720
2721 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2722
2723 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
2724 Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
2725 command when running temacs like this:
2726
2727 setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2728
2729
2730 *** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.
2731
2732 In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during
2733 `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel"
2734 item, Linux kernel shipped with Fedora Core 4 randomizes the virtual
2735 address space of a process. As the result dumping may fail even if
2736 you turn off exec-shield. In this case, use the -R option to the setarch
2737 command:
2738
2739 setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2740
2741 or
2742
2743 setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
2744
2745 *** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
2746
2747 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2748 Makefile in the src subdirectory.
2749
2750 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2751 space available on the machine.
2752
2753 On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2754 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2755 for large blocks (many pages).
2756
2757 *** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2758 *** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2759 *** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2760 *** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
2761
2762 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2763 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2764 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2765
2766 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2767 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2768 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2769 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2770 when unpacking the shell archive.
2771
2772 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2773 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2774 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2775
2776 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2777 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2778
2779 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2780 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2781 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2782 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2783 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2784 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2785 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2786 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2787 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2788 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2789 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2790 and remake temacs.
2791 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2792
2793 *** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
2794
2795 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2796 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2797 space than was allocated.
2798
2799 This could be caused by
2800 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2801 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2802 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2803 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2804 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2805 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2806 deleting that file.
2807 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2808 (not from the directory you expected).
2809 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2810 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2811 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2812 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2813 the space required.
2814
2815 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2816 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2817
2818 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2819 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2820 problem.
2821
2822 *** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
2823
2824 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2825 C backtrace printed by GDB:
2826
2827 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2828 (gdb) where
2829 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2830 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2831 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2832 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
2833
2834 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2835 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2836 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2837 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2838 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2839 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2840 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2841 distribution:
2842
2843 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2844 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2845 know what's really going on here. */
2846 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2847 0x10000000. */
2848 #if defined __linux__
2849 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2850 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2851 #endif
2852 #endif
2853 #endif /* 0 */
2854
2855 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2856 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2857 should now succeed.
2858
2859 *** OpenBSD 4.0 macppc: Segfault during dumping.
2860
2861 The build aborts with signal 11 when the command `./temacs --batch
2862 --load loadup bootstrap' tries to load files.el. A workaround seems
2863 to be to reduce the level of compiler optimization used during the
2864 build (from -O2 to -O1). It is possible this is an OpenBSD
2865 GCC problem specific to the macppc architecture, possibly only
2866 occurring with older versions of GCC (e.g. 3.3.5).
2867
2868 *** openSUSE 10.3: Segfault in bcopy during dumping.
2869
2870 This is due to a bug in the bcopy implementation in openSUSE 10.3.
2871 It is/will be fixed in an openSUSE update.
2872
2873 ** Installation
2874
2875 *** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
2876
2877 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2878 supplies the `install-info' command.
2879
2880 *** Installing to a directory with spaces in the name fails.
2881
2882 For example, if you call configure with a directory-related option
2883 with spaces in the value, eg --enable-locallisppath='/path/with\ spaces'.
2884 Using directory paths with spaces is not supported at this time: you
2885 must re-configure without using spaces.
2886
2887 *** Installing to a directory with non-ASCII characters in the name fails.
2888
2889 Installation may fail, or the Emacs executable may not start
2890 correctly, if a directory name containing non-ASCII characters is used
2891 as a `configure' argument (e.g. `--prefix'). The problem can also
2892 occur if a non-ASCII directory is specified in the EMACSLOADPATH
2893 envvar.
2894
2895 *** On Solaris, use GNU Make when installing an out-of-tree build
2896
2897 The Emacs configuration process allows you to configure the
2898 build environment so that you can build emacs in a directory
2899 outside of the distribution tree. When installing Emacs from an
2900 out-of-tree build directory on Solaris, you may need to use GNU
2901 make. The make programs bundled with Solaris support the VPATH
2902 macro but use it differently from the way the VPATH macro is
2903 used by GNU make. The differences will cause the "make install"
2904 step to fail, leaving you with an incomplete emacs
2905 installation. GNU make is available in /usr/sfw/bin on Solaris
2906 10 and can be installed as /opt/sfw/bin/gmake from the Solaris 9
2907 Software Companion CDROM.
2908
2909 The problems due to the VPATH processing differences affect only
2910 out of tree builds so, if you are on a Solaris installation
2911 without GNU make, you can install Emacs completely by installing
2912 from a build environment using the original emacs distribution tree.
2913
2914 ** First execution
2915
2916 *** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
2917
2918 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2919 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2920 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2921 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
2922
2923 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
2924
2925 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2926 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
2927
2928 *** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2929
2930 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2931
2932 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2933 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2934 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2935 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2936
2937 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2938 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2939 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2940 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2941 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2942
2943 * Emacs 19 problems
2944
2945 ** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
2946
2947 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2948 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2949 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2950 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2951
2952 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2953
2954 * Runtime problems on legacy systems
2955
2956 This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2957 If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2958 it is unlikely you will see any of these.
2959
2960 ** Ancient operating systems
2961
2962 AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2963
2964 *** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2965
2966 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2967 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2968
2969 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2970 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2971 X11Dev... with smit.
2972
2973 (This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2974
2975 *** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2976
2977 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2978 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2979 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2980 treated as control characters.
2981
2982 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2983 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2984
2985 *** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2986
2987 Could not load program emacs
2988 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2989 Error was: Exec format error
2990
2991 or this one:
2992
2993 Could not load program .emacs
2994 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2995 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2996 Error was: Exec format error
2997
2998 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2999 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
3000
3001 *** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
3002
3003 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
3004 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
3005
3006 *** ISC Unix
3007
3008 **** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
3009
3010 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
3011 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
3012 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
3013 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
3014 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
3015
3016 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
3017 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
3018
3019 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
3020
3021 **** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
3022
3023 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
3024 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
3025 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
3026 communicating through pipes.
3027
3028 *** Irix
3029
3030 *** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
3031
3032 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
3033 as of 8 Dec 1998.
3034
3035 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
3036
3037 *** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
3038 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
3039
3040 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
3041
3042 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
3043 003082 August 11, 1998.
3044
3045 *** OPENSTEP
3046
3047 **** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
3048
3049 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
3050 following message:
3051
3052 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
3053
3054 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
3055 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
3056 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
3057
3058 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
3059 {
3060 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
3061 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
3062
3063 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
3064 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
3065
3066 *** Solaris 2.x
3067
3068 **** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
3069
3070 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
3071 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
3072 as GCC.
3073
3074 **** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
3075
3076 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
3077 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
3078 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
3079
3080 **** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
3081
3082 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
3083 version of Solaris that you are using.
3084
3085 **** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
3086
3087 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
3088 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
3089
3090 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
3091
3092 **** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
3093
3094 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
3095 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
3096 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
3097 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
3098 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
3099
3100 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
3101 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
3102 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
3103 for certain.
3104
3105 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
3106 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
3107 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
3108
3109 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
3110 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
3111
3112 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
3113 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
3114
3115 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
3116 Solaris 2.5.
3117
3118 **** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
3119 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
3120
3121 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
3122 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
3123
3124 #if ThreadedX
3125 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3126 #endif
3127
3128 to:
3129
3130 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
3131 #if ThreadedX
3132 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3133 #endif
3134 #endif
3135
3136 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
3137 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
3138 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
3139 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
3140 definition for your type of machine and system.
3141
3142 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
3143 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
3144 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
3145
3146 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
3147 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
3148 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
3149 patch.
3150
3151 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
3152 he changed
3153 #define ThreadedX YES
3154 to
3155 #define ThreadedX NO
3156 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
3157 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
3158 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
3159
3160 **** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
3161
3162 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
3163 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
3164 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
3165 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
3166 described in the Solaris FAQ
3167 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
3168 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
3169
3170 **** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
3171 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
3172 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
3173 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
3174 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
3175 and the default CFLAGS.
3176
3177 **** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
3178
3179 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
3180 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
3181 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
3182 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
3183 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
3184 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
3185 are currently recommended for your host.
3186
3187 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
3188 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
3189 105284-18 might fix it again.
3190
3191 **** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
3192
3193 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
3194 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
3195 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
3196 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
3197
3198 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
3199 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
3200 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
3201 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
3202 should do.
3203
3204 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
3205 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
3206 libraries.
3207
3208 *** HP/UX versions before 11.0
3209
3210 HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
3211 HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
3212
3213 **** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
3214
3215 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
3216 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
3217 does not happen.
3218
3219 *** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
3220
3221 See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
3222
3223 *** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
3224
3225 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
3226 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
3227 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
3228 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
3229 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
3230 install them and rebuild Emacs.
3231
3232 *** Ultrix and Digital Unix
3233
3234 **** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
3235
3236 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
3237 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
3238 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
3239 hand.
3240
3241 **** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
3242
3243 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
3244 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
3245 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
3246 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
3247 in Emacs.
3248
3249 **** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
3250
3251 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
3252 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
3253 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
3254 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
3255
3256 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
3257 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
3258
3259 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
3260 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
3261 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
3262 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
3263
3264 *** SVr4
3265
3266 **** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
3267
3268 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
3269 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
3270 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
3271
3272 **** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
3273
3274 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
3275 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
3276 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
3277
3278 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
3279 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
3280 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
3281 configure script) that reads:
3282 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
3283 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
3284 the kernel bug.
3285
3286 *** Irix 5 and earlier
3287
3288 Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
3289 shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
3290
3291 **** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
3292
3293 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
3294 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
3295 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
3296 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
3297 syms.h.
3298
3299 **** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
3300
3301 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
3302 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
3303 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
3304 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
3305 command `swap -l'.
3306
3307 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
3308 line like this:
3309
3310 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
3311
3312 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
3313 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
3314 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
3315 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
3316 information.
3317
3318 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
3319 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
3320 on the network that can log on to the host.
3321
3322 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
3323 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
3324 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
3325 icons.
3326
3327 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
3328 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
3329 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
3330 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
3331
3332 **** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
3333
3334 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
3335 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
3336
3337 **** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
3338
3339 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
3340 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
3341 find that string, and take out the spaces.
3342
3343 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
3344
3345 *** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3346
3347 **** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3348
3349 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3350 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3351 fonts, so it does not work.
3352
3353 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3354 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3355 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3356 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3357 resources affect Emacs also:
3358
3359 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3360 *Background: scoBackground
3361 *Foreground: scoForeground
3362
3363 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3364 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3365
3366 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3367 Emacs*Background: white
3368 Emacs*Foreground: black
3369
3370 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3371 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3372 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3373 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3374 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3375 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3376 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3377 Open Desktop display.
3378
3379 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3380 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3381
3382 **** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3383
3384 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3385 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3386 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3387 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3388 GCC.
3389
3390 **** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3391
3392 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3393 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3394 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3395 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3396 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3397 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3398
3399 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3400 But you have to be root to do it.
3401
3402 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3403
3404 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3405 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3406 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3407 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3408 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3409
3410 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3411 These changes take effect when you reboot.
3412
3413 *** Linux 1.x
3414
3415 **** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
3416
3417 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3418 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3419 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
3420
3421 **** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3422 truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
3423
3424 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
3425 1.3.75.
3426
3427 ** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3428
3429 *** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3430
3431 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3432 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3433
3434 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3435 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3436 with the user.
3437
3438 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3439 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3440 communicate with the subprocess.
3441
3442 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3443 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3444 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3445 stdin.
3446
3447 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3448
3449 For Perl 4:
3450
3451 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3452 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3453 ***************
3454 *** 68,74 ****
3455 $rcfile=".perldb";
3456 }
3457 else {
3458 ! $console = "con";
3459 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3460 }
3461
3462 --- 68,74 ----
3463 $rcfile=".perldb";
3464 }
3465 else {
3466 ! $console = "";
3467 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3468 }
3469
3470
3471 For Perl 5:
3472 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3473 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3474 ***************
3475 *** 22,28 ****
3476 $rcfile=".perldb";
3477 }
3478 elsif (-e "con") {
3479 ! $console = "con";
3480 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3481 }
3482 else {
3483 --- 22,28 ----
3484 $rcfile=".perldb";
3485 }
3486 elsif (-e "con") {
3487 ! $console = "";
3488 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3489 }
3490 else {
3491
3492 *** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3493
3494 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3495 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3496
3497 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3498
3499 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3500 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3501 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3502 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3503
3504 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3505
3506 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3507 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3508 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3509 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3510 PATH.
3511
3512 ** MS-DOS
3513
3514 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT or later, "config msdos" fails.
3515
3516 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3517 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3518 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3519 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3520 the front of your PATH environment variable.
3521
3522 *** When Emacs compiled with DJGPP runs on Vista, it runs out of memory.
3523
3524 If Emacs running on Vista displays "!MEM FULL!" in the mode line, you
3525 are hitting the memory allocation bugs in the Vista DPMI server. See
3526 msdos/INSTALL for how to work around these bugs (search for "Vista").
3527
3528 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3529 like make-docfile.
3530
3531 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3532 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3533 compilation are not the same. See msdos/INSTALL for the explanation
3534 of how to avoid this problem.
3535
3536 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
3537
3538 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
3539
3540 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3541 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3542 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3543 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3544 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3545 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3546 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3547 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3548 your system works as before.
3549
3550 *** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
3551
3552 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3553 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3554 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3555 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3556 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
3557
3558 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3559 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3560 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3561 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
3562
3563 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3564 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3565 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3566 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3567 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
3568
3569 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3570 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3571 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
3572
3573 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3574 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3575 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
3576
3577 *** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
3578
3579 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
3580
3581 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3582 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3583 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
3584
3585 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3586 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3587 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3588 incorrect library functions.
3589
3590 *** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3591 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
3592
3593 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3594 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3595 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3596 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
3597
3598 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3599 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3600 Lisp.
3601
3602 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3603 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3604 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3605 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3606 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3607 compiled with DJGPP v2). The file msdos/INSTALL explains this issue
3608 in more detail.
3609
3610 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3611 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3612 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3613 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3614 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3615 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3616 properly truncated.
3617
3618 ** Archaic window managers and toolkits
3619
3620 *** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
3621
3622 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3623 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3624 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3625 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3626 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
3627
3628 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
3629
3630 **** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
3631
3632 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3633 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
3634
3635 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
3636
3637 ** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
3638
3639 *** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
3640
3641 This shell command should fix it:
3642
3643 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
3644
3645 *** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3646 as a concentrator.
3647
3648 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
3649 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
3650
3651 * Build problems on legacy systems
3652
3653 ** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
3654
3655 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3656 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3657 such as bash.
3658
3659 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3660 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
3661
3662 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3663 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
3664
3665 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
3666
3667 This problem manifests itself as an error message
3668
3669 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
3670
3671 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3672 were built for an older system version,
3673
3674 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
3675
3676 made the problem go away.
3677
3678 ** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
3679
3680 If you get errors such as
3681
3682 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3683 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3684 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
3685
3686 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3687 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3688 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3689 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3690 ones available when you build Emacs.
3691
3692 ** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
3693
3694 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
3695
3696 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
3697
3698 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
3699
3700 ** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
3701
3702 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3703 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3704 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
3705
3706 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3707 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
3708
3709 ** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
3710
3711 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3712 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3713 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3714 with a floating point option other than the default.
3715
3716 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3717 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3718 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3719 floating point option: -fsoft.
3720
3721 ** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3722
3723 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3724
3725 ** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3726
3727 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3728
3729 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3730 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3731
3732 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3733 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3734 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3735 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3736 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3737 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3738 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3739
3740 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3741 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3742 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3743 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3744 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3745 Lisp_Object *args;
3746 ...
3747 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3748 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3749 Lisp_Object *args;
3750 Lisp_Object tem;
3751 ...
3752 tem = args[i];
3753 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3754 causes the problem to go away.
3755 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3756 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3757
3758 ** 68000 C compiler problems
3759
3760 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3761 These are some that have been observed.
3762
3763 *** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3764 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3765 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3766
3767 *** "cannot reclaim" error.
3768
3769 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3770 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3771 simpler expressions.
3772
3773 *** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3774
3775 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3776 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3777
3778 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3779
3780 lose (arg)
3781 struct foo arg;
3782 {
3783 test ((int *) arg.y);
3784 }
3785
3786 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3787 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3788 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3789
3790 This problem will only happen if USE_LISP_UNION_TYPE is manually
3791 defined in lisp.h.
3792
3793 *** C compilers lose on returning unions.
3794
3795 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3796 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3797 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3798
3799 This problem will only happen if USE_LISP_UNION_TYPE is manually
3800 defined in lisp.h.
3801
3802 \f
3803 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
3804
3805 GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
3806 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
3807 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
3808 (at your option) any later version.
3809
3810 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
3811 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
3812 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
3813 GNU General Public License for more details.
3814
3815 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
3816 along with GNU Emacs. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
3817
3818 \f
3819 Local variables:
3820 mode: outline
3821 paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3822 end:
3823
3824 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a