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