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1 Copyright (C) 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
2 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
3 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
4 See the end of the file for license conditions.
5
6
7 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
8 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
9 and browsing through the outline headers.
10
11 * Emacs startup failures
12
13 ** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
14
15 A typical error message might be something like
16
17 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
18
19 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
20 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
21 are:
22
23 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
24
25 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
26 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
27 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
28
29 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
30 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
31 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
32
33 ** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
34
35 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
36 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
37 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
38 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
39 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
40 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
41 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
42 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
43 not to work.
44
45 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
46 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
47 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
48 same directory where system header files are kept.
49
50 ** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
51
52 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
53 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
54 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
55 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
56 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
57 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
58
59 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
60 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
61 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
62 it constitutes a separate package.
63
64 ** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
65
66 The typical error message might be like this:
67
68 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
69
70 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
71 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
72 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
73 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
74 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
75 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
76 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
77
78 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
79 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
80
81 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
82 file.
83
84 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
85 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
86 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
87
88 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
89
90 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
91 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
92 load-path.
93
94 ** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
95
96 An example of such an error is:
97
98 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
99
100 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
101 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
102 present in load-path:
103
104 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
105
106 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
107 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
108 load-path.
109
110 ** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
111
112 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
113
114 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
115 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
116 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
117 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
118 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
119 /******************************************************************
120
121 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
122 @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
123 _XimMakeImName(lcd)
124 XLCd lcd;
125 {
126 - char* begin;
127 - char* end;
128 + char* begin = NULL;
129 + char* end = NULL;
130 char* ret;
131 int i = 0;
132 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
133 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
134 }
135 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
136 if (ret != NULL) {
137 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
138 + if (begin != NULL) {
139 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
140 + } else {
141 + ret[0] = '\0';
142 + }
143 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
144 }
145 return ret;
146
147 ** Emacs crashes on startup after a glibc upgrade.
148
149 This is caused by a binary incompatible change to the malloc
150 implementation in glibc 2.5.90-22. As a result, Emacs binaries built
151 using prior versions of glibc crash when run under 2.5.90-22.
152
153 This problem was first seen in pre-release versions of Fedora 7, and
154 may be fixed in the final Fedora 7 release. To stop the crash from
155 happening, first try upgrading to the newest version of glibc; if this
156 does not work, rebuild Emacs with the same version of glibc that you
157 will run it under. For details, see
158
159 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=239344
160
161 * Crash bugs
162
163 ** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
164
165 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
166 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
167 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
168 happens to exist on your X server).
169
170 ** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
171
172 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
173 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
174 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
175
176 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
177 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
178
179 ** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
180 a segmentation fault and core dump.
181
182 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
183 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
184
185 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
186
187 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
188 untar it :-).
189
190 ** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
191 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
192 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
193 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
194 older version.
195
196 ** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
197
198 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
199 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
200 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
201 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
202 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
203
204 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
205 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
206 terminfo when built.
207
208 ** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
209
210 If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
211 reported to prevent the crashes.
212
213 ** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
214
215 It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
216
217 This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
218 the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
219 flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
220 necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
221
222 On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
223 configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
224
225 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes when closing a display (x-close-connection).
226
227 This happens because of bugs in Gtk+. Gtk+ 2.10 seems to be OK. See bug
228 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85715.
229
230 ** Emacs compiled with Gtk+ crashes on startup on Cygwin.
231
232 A typical error message is
233 ***MEMORY-ERROR***: emacs[5172]: GSlice: failed to allocate 504 bytes
234 (alignment: 512): Function not implemented
235
236 Emacs supplies its own malloc, but glib (part of Gtk+) calls memalign and on
237 Cygwin, that becomes the Cygwin supplied memalign. As malloc is not the
238 Cygwin malloc, the Cygwin memalign always returns ENOSYS. A fix for this
239 problem would be welcome.
240
241 * General runtime problems
242
243 ** Lisp problems
244
245 *** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
246
247 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
248 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
249 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
250 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
251
252 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
253 than the corresponding .el file.
254
255 *** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
256
257 These control the actions of Emacs.
258 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
259 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
260 "load" will search.
261
262 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
263 of them, then try again.
264
265 *** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
266
267 The error message might be something like this:
268
269 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
270
271 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
272 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
273 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
274 corrects that.
275
276 *** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
277
278 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
279 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
280 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
281
282 *** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
283 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
284 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
285 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
286
287 ** Keyboard problems
288
289 *** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
290
291 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
292 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
293 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
294 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
295 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
296 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
297
298 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
299 them to two different keys.
300
301 *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
302
303 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
304 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
305 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
306
307 *** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
308 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
309
310 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
311 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
312 another escape character in kermit. One user did
313
314 set escape-character 17
315
316 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
317
318 ** Mailers and other helper programs
319
320 *** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
321
322 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
323 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
324 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
325 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
326 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
327 old POP protocol.
328
329 *** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
330
331 RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
332 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
333 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
334
335 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
336 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
337 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
338 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
339 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
340 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
341 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
342
343 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
344 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
345 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
346 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
347 make install.
348
349 chgrp mail movemail
350 chmod 2755 movemail
351
352 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
353 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
354 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
355 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
356 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
357 directory copy is ineffective.
358
359 *** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
360
361 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
362 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
363
364 ** Problems with hostname resolution
365
366 *** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
367 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
368 *** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
369 *** Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
370
371 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
372 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
373 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
374 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
375
376 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
377 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
378
379 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
380 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
381
382 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
383
384 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
385 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
386 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
387 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
388 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
389 be careful not to lose the others.
390
391 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
392
393 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
394
395 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
396 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
397 again to say this:
398
399 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
400
401 *** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
402
403 For example, (system-name) returns some variation on
404 "localhost.localdomain", rather the name you were expecting.
405
406 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
407 (i.e. a name with at least one ".") either in /etc/hosts,
408 /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system calls for specifying
409 this.
410
411 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
412 mail-host-address to the value you want.
413
414 ** NFS and RFS
415
416 *** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
417 appear on disk.
418
419 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
420 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
421 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
422 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
423 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
424 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
425
426 *** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
427 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
428 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
429 causes it.
430
431 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
432 call in the RFS server.
433
434 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
435 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
436 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
437 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
438
439 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
440
441 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
442 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
443 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
444 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
445 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
446 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
447 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
448
449 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
450
451 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
452 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
453 retrieving revision 1.2
454 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
455 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
456 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
457 ***************
458 *** 163,169 ****
459 /*
460 * No return sent for close or fsync!
461 */
462 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
463 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
464 else
465 {
466 --- 166,172 ----
467 /*
468 * No return sent for close or fsync!
469 */
470 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
471 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
472 else
473 {
474
475 ** PSGML
476
477 *** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
478 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
479 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
480
481 *** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
482
483 PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
484 as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
485 of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
486 sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
487 HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
488 (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
489 (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
490
491 *** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
492 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
493 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
494 earlier versions.
495
496 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
497 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
498 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
499 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
500 (cond
501 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
502 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
503 + (insert-file-contents entity)
504 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
505 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
506 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
507
508 ** AUCTeX
509
510 You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
511 it.
512
513 *** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
514
515 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
516 these problems.
517
518 *** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
519
520 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
521 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
522
523 ** PCL-CVS
524
525 *** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit.
526
527 When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examined
528 directory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous message
529 from which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committed
530 files. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer are
531 not updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines are
532 added to the top-level directory.
533
534 This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS
535 1.12.10 or newer to fix this problem.
536
537 ** Miscellaneous problems
538
539 *** Emacs uses 100% of CPU time
540
541 This is a known problem with some versions of the Semantic package.
542 The solution is to upgrade Semantic to version 2.0pre4 (distributed
543 with CEDET 1.0pre4) or later.
544
545 *** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
546
547 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
548 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
549 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
550
551 *** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
552 terminal type.
553
554 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
555 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
556 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
557 emulates.
558
559 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
560 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
561 it only if it is undefined.
562
563 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
564
565 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
566 happen in a non-login shell.
567
568 *** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
569
570 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
571 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
572 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
573 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
574
575 if ($?EMACS) then
576 if ("$EMACS" =~ /*) then
577 unset edit
578 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
579 endif
580 endif
581
582 *** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
583
584 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
585 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
586 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
587
588 127.0.0.1 localhost
589 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
590
591 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
592
593 *** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
594
595 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
596 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
597 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
598 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
599 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
600 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
601
602 update-alternatives --config ftp
603
604 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
605
606 *** JPEG images aren't displayed.
607
608 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
609 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
610 correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
611 against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
612
613 *** Dired is very slow.
614
615 This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
616 time. Possible reasons for this include:
617
618 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
619 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
620
621 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
622
623 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
624
625 To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
626 `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
627 invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
628 (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
629
630 *** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
631 under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
632
633 *** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
634
635 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
636 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
637 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
638 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
639
640 *** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
641
642 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
643 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
644 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
645
646 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
647
648 *** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
649 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
650 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
651 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
652 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
653
654 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
655 process invokes Emacs several times.
656
657 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
658 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
659 can be found.
660
661 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
662 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
663 specified run-time search path in the executable.
664
665 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
666 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
667 backtraces like this:
668
669 (dbx) where
670 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]
671 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
672 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
673 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
674 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
675 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
676 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
677 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
678 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
679
680 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
681 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
682 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
683 to work around the problem.
684
685 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
686
687 *** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
688 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
689
690 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
691 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
692 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
693
694 *** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
695
696 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
697 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
698 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
699 support for 8-bit characters.
700
701 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
702 this at your shell's prompt:
703
704 ispell -vv
705
706 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
707 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
708 does not.
709
710 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
711 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
712 Then rebuild the speller.
713
714 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
715 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
716
717 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
718 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
719 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
720 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
721 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
722
723 If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
724 you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
725 can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
726 in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
727
728 * Runtime problems related to font handling
729
730 ** Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
731
732 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
733 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
734 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
735
736 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
737 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
738 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
739
740 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
741 display all the characters Emacs supports. The etl-unicode collection
742 of fonts (available from <URL:ftp://ftp.x.org/contrib/fonts/> and
743 <URL:ftp://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/mirror/X.Org/contrib/fonts/>) includes
744 fonts that can display many Unicode characters; they can also be used
745 by ps-print and ps-mule to print Unicode characters.
746
747 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
748 missing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur for
749 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
750 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
751 of this character to display a space.
752
753 ** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
754
755 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution
756 or the etl-unicode collection (see the previous entry).
757
758 ** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
759
760 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
761 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
762 lines do not overlap.
763
764 ** Loading fonts is very slow.
765
766 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
767 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
768 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
769 "fonts.scale".
770
771 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
772 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
773
774 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
775 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
776 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
777
778 ** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
779
780 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
781 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
782 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
783 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
784 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
785 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
786 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
787 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
788 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
789 to the end of a very large buffer.
790
791 Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
792 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
793 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
794 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
795
796 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
797 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
798 fontification by setting the variable
799 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
800 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
801
802 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
803 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
804
805 ** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
806 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
807
808 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
809 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
810 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
811
812 ** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
813
814 This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
815 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
816 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
817 the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
818 fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
819 Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
820 and then start the application again.
821 If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
822 application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
823 of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
824 sufficient to recompile Qt.
825
826 ** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
827
828 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
829 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
830 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
831 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
832
833 A workaround for this is to add something like
834
835 emacs.waitForWM: false
836
837 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
838 frame's parameter list, like this:
839
840 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
841
842 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
843
844 ** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
845
846 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
847 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
848 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
849 problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
850 `.emacs'.
851
852 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
853 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
854 property.
855
856 ** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
857
858 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
859 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
860 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
861 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
862 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
863
864 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
865 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
866
867 ** Subscript/superscript text in TeX is hard to read.
868
869 tex-mode displays subscript/superscript text in the faces
870 subscript/superscript, which are smaller than the normal font and
871 lowered/raised. With some fonts, nested superscripts (say) can be
872 hard to read. Switching to a different font, or changing your
873 antialiasing setting (on an LCD screen), can both make the problem
874 disappear. Alternatively, customize the subscript and superscript
875 faces to increase their height.
876
877 * Internationalization problems
878
879 ** M-{ does not work on a Spanish PC keyboard.
880
881 Many Spanish keyboards seem to ignore that combination. Emacs can't
882 do anything about it.
883
884 ** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
885
886 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
887 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
888 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
889 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
890 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
891 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
892 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
893 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
894 include in the fontset spec:
895
896 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
897 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
898 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
899
900 ** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
901
902 Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in the
903 ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts of
904 CJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets:
905
906 GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601
907
908 The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on by
909 default). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacs
910 charset is decided by the current language environment. For instance,
911 in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312.
912
913 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
914 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
915 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
916 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
917 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
918 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
919 information.
920
921 ** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
922
923 Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
924 library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
925 following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
926 though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
927 distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
928
929 --- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
930 +++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
931 @@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
932
933 (mapcar
934 (lambda (x)
935 - (mapcar
936 - (lambda (y)
937 - (mucs-define-coding-system
938 - (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
939 - (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
940 - (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
941 - (cdr x)))
942 + (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
943 + ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
944 + ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
945 + ;; system definitions.
946 + (let ((y (cadr x)))
947 + (mucs-define-coding-system
948 + (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
949 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
950 + (mapcar
951 + (lambda (y)
952 + (mucs-define-coding-system
953 + (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
954 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
955 + (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
956 + (cdr x)))
957 `((utf-8
958 (utf-8-unix
959 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
960
961 Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
962 Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
963
964 ** Mule-UCS compilation problem.
965
966 Emacs of old versions and XEmacs byte-compile the form `(progn progn
967 ...)' the same way as `(progn ...)', but Emacs of version 21.3 and the
968 later process that form just as interpreter does, that is, as `progn'
969 variable reference. Apply the following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 to
970 make it compiled by the latest Emacs.
971
972 --- mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 00:42:23 -0000 1.1.1.1
973 +++ mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 01:31:51 -0000 1.3
974 @@ -639,10 +639,14 @@
975 (mucs-notify-embedment 'mucs-ccl-required name)
976 (setq ccl-pgm-list (cdr ccl-pgm-list)))
977 ; (message "MCCLREGFIN:%S" result)
978 - `(progn
979 - (setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
980 - (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
981 - ,@result)))
982 + ;; The only way the function is used in this package is included
983 + ;; in `mucs-package-definition-end-hook' value, where it must
984 + ;; return (possibly empty) *list* of forms. Do this. Do not rely
985 + ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)'
986 + ;; form.
987 + `((setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
988 + (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
989 + ,@result)))
990
991 ;;; Add hook for embedding translation informations to a package.
992 (add-hook 'mucs-package-definition-end-hook
993
994 ** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
995
996 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
997 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
998 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
999 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
1000 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
1001 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
1002
1003 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
1004
1005 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
1006
1007 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
1008 problem.
1009
1010 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
1011 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
1012 `xset fp rehash'.
1013
1014 ** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
1015
1016 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
1017 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
1018 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
1019 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
1020 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
1021
1022 ** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1023
1024 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1025 (standard-display-european t)
1026 That should be changed to
1027 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1028
1029 * X runtime problems
1030
1031 ** X keyboard problems
1032
1033 *** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
1034
1035 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
1036 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
1037 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
1038 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
1039
1040 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
1041
1042 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
1043
1044 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
1045 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
1046 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
1047
1048 *** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
1049
1050 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
1051
1052 *** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method).
1053
1054 Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program
1055 which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users
1056 from using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'.
1057
1058 One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' file
1059 which can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory.
1060 However, that requires root access.
1061
1062 Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources.
1063
1064 Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.
1065
1066 The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx
1067 (Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. If
1068 you want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitx
1069 by another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or be
1070 accustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'.
1071
1072 *** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1073
1074 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1075 for character composition.
1076
1077 *** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1078
1079 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1080 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1081 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1082 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1083 purposes.
1084
1085 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1086 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1087
1088 *** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1089
1090 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1091 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1092 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1093 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1094 change this.
1095
1096 *** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
1097
1098 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
1099 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
1100 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
1101
1102 *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
1103 directly with an X server.
1104
1105 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
1106 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
1107 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
1108 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
1109 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
1110 have made the key binding correctly.
1111
1112 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
1113 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
1114 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
1115 default.
1116
1117 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
1118
1119 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
1120 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
1121
1122 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
1123 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
1124 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
1125 modifier bit not otherwise used.
1126
1127 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
1128 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
1129 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
1130 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
1131
1132 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
1133 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
1134
1135 ** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
1136
1137 *** Gnome: Emacs receives input directly from the keyboard, bypassing XIM.
1138
1139 This seems to happen when gnome-settings-daemon version 2.12 or later
1140 is running. If gnome-settings-daemon is not running, Emacs receives
1141 input through XIM without any problem. Furthermore, this seems only
1142 to happen in *.UTF-8 locales; zh_CN.GB2312 and zh_CN.GBK locales, for
1143 example, work fine. A bug report has been filed in the Gnome
1144 bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=357032
1145
1146 *** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
1147
1148 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
1149 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
1150 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
1151 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
1152 been filed.
1153
1154 *** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
1155 or messed up.
1156
1157 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
1158 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
1159 background.
1160
1161 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
1162 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
1163 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
1164 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
1165 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
1166
1167 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
1168 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
1169 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
1170 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
1171 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
1172 present or commented out:
1173
1174 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
1175 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
1176 Emacs*Foreground
1177 Emacs*Background
1178
1179 It is also reported that a bug in the gtk-engines-qt engine can cause this if
1180 Emacs is compiled with Gtk+.
1181 The bug is fixed in version 0.7 or newer of gtk-engines-qt.
1182
1183 *** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1184
1185 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1186 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1187 of klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections,
1188 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1189 while, Emacs may print a message:
1190
1191 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1192
1193 A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
1194 comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
1195
1196 *** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1197
1198 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1199 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1200 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1201 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1202
1203 *** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
1204 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
1205 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
1206 problem disappears.
1207
1208 *** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
1209 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
1210 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
1211 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
1212 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
1213 used with neXtaw at run time.
1214
1215 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
1216 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
1217 built Emacs with.
1218
1219 *** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
1220
1221 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
1222 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
1223 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
1224 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
1225
1226 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
1227 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
1228
1229 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
1230 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
1231 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
1232
1233 *** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
1234
1235 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
1236 emulation for which it is set up.
1237
1238 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
1239 LessTif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
1240 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
1241 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
1242 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
1243 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
1244 menu placement.
1245
1246 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
1247 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
1248 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
1249 developers.
1250
1251 *** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
1252
1253 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
1254
1255 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
1256
1257 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
1258 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
1259 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
1260 the resource prevents the problem.
1261
1262 ** General X problems
1263
1264 *** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1265
1266 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1267 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1268 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1269 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1270
1271 Here's how to do this:
1272
1273 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1274
1275 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1276 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1277 to normal, do
1278
1279 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1280
1281 *** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
1282
1283 The messages might say something like this:
1284
1285 Unable to load color "grey95"
1286
1287 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
1288
1289 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
1290
1291 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
1292 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
1293 resources to load all the colors it needs.
1294
1295 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
1296
1297 "undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the
1298 X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where
1299 X expects to find it.
1300
1301 *** Improving performance with slow X connections.
1302
1303 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
1304 be carried out at the same time:
1305
1306 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
1307 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
1308 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
1309 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
1310 package.
1311
1312 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
1313 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar. Adding the
1314 following forms to your .emacs file will accomplish that, but only
1315 after the the initial frame is displayed:
1316
1317 (scroll-bar-mode -1)
1318 (menu-bar-mode -1)
1319 (tool-bar-mode -1)
1320
1321 For still quicker startup, put these X resources in your .Xdefaults
1322 file:
1323
1324 Emacs.verticalScrollBars: off
1325 Emacs.menuBar: off
1326 Emacs.toolBar: off
1327
1328 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
1329 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
1330
1331 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
1332 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
1333 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
1334 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
1335 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
1336 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a separate
1337 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
1338 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
1339 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
1340 For more about lbxproxy, see:
1341 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
1342
1343 5) If copying and killing is slow, try to disable the interaction with the
1344 native system's clipboard by adding these lines to your .emacs file:
1345 (setq interprogram-cut-function nil)
1346 (setq interprogram-paste-function nil)
1347
1348 *** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1349
1350 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1351 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1352 likely to cause it.
1353
1354 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1355
1356 *** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
1357
1358 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
1359 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
1360
1361 *** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
1362
1363 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
1364 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
1365 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
1366 the Files menu).
1367
1368 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
1369 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
1370 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
1371 workaround can be found.
1372
1373 *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
1374 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
1375
1376 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
1377 emacs*Cursor: black
1378 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
1379 that isn't a color.)
1380
1381 The fix is to correct your X resources.
1382
1383 *** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
1384
1385 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
1386 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
1387 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
1388 font.
1389
1390 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
1391 your font path, like this:
1392
1393 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
1394
1395 *** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
1396
1397 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
1398
1399 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
1400
1401 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
1402 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
1403 want, rewrite the resource.
1404
1405 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
1406 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
1407 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
1408
1409 *** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
1410 *** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
1411
1412 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
1413 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
1414 the environment.
1415
1416 *** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
1417
1418 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
1419 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
1420 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
1421
1422 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
1423 whether this problem is present on a given system.
1424
1425 *** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
1426
1427 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
1428 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
1429 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
1430 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
1431
1432 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
1433 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
1434 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
1435
1436 The easy way to do this is to put
1437
1438 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
1439
1440 in your site-init.el file.
1441
1442 * Runtime problems on character terminals
1443
1444 ** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
1445
1446 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
1447 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
1448 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
1449 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
1450 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
1451 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
1452 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
1453 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
1454
1455 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
1456
1457 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
1458 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
1459 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
1460
1461 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
1462 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
1463 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
1464 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
1465 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
1466 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
1467
1468 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
1469 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
1470 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
1471 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
1472 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
1473 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
1474 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
1475 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
1476 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
1477
1478 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
1479 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
1480 codes. You might as well try it.
1481
1482 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
1483 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
1484 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
1485 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
1486 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
1487 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
1488 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
1489 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
1490
1491 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
1492 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
1493 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
1494 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
1495 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
1496 control handling.)
1497
1498 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
1499 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
1500 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
1501 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
1502 other control characters are already used by emacs.
1503
1504 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
1505 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
1506 order to continue.
1507
1508 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
1509 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
1510 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
1511 automatically. Here is an example:
1512
1513 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1514
1515 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
1516 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
1517 manually.
1518
1519 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
1520 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
1521 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
1522 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
1523 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
1524 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
1525 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
1526 of inferior systems.
1527
1528 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
1529
1530 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
1531 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
1532 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
1533 that wants to use flow control.
1534
1535 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
1536 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
1537 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
1538
1539 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
1540 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
1541 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
1542
1543 ** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
1544
1545 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
1546 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
1547 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
1548
1549 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
1550 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
1551 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
1552 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
1553 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
1554 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
1555 There are several possibilities:
1556
1557 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
1558
1559 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
1560 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
1561
1562 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
1563 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
1564 by termcap.
1565
1566 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
1567 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
1568 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
1569 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
1570 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
1571 tested on many kinds of terminals.
1572
1573 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
1574
1575 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
1576 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
1577 for certain terminals.
1578
1579 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
1580 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
1581
1582 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
1583 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
1584
1585 ** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
1586
1587 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
1588 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
1589 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
1590 control on the local system.
1591
1592 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
1593 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
1594 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
1595 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
1596
1597 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
1598 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
1599 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
1600
1601 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
1602 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
1603 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
1604 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
1605
1606 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
1607
1608 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
1609 info.
1610
1611 ** Output from Control-V is slow.
1612
1613 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
1614 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
1615 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
1616 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
1617 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
1618 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
1619
1620 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
1621 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
1622 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
1623 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
1624 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
1625 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
1626 time as the operations really take.
1627
1628 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
1629 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
1630 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
1631 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
1632 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
1633 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
1634 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
1635 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
1636 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
1637 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
1638
1639 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
1640 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
1641 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
1642 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
1643 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
1644 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
1645 `cm' string.
1646
1647 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
1648 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
1649 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
1650
1651 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
1652 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
1653
1654 ** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
1655
1656 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
1657 after a day or two.
1658
1659 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
1660 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
1661 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
1662 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
1663 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
1664 to it.
1665
1666 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
1667 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
1668 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
1669 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
1670 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
1671 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
1672
1673 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
1674 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
1675 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
1676 You can probably access help-command via f1.
1677
1678 ** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
1679
1680 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
1681 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
1682 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
1683 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
1684 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
1685 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
1686 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
1687 "colors".
1688
1689 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
1690 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
1691 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
1692 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
1693 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
1694 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
1695 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
1696 capability).
1697
1698 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
1699 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
1700 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
1701 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
1702
1703 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
1704 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
1705 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
1706 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
1707 emulator.
1708
1709 Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line
1710 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
1711 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
1712 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
1713
1714 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
1715 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
1716 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
1717 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
1718 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
1719 `global-font-lock-mode'.
1720
1721 * Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
1722
1723 ** GNU/Linux
1724
1725 *** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted.
1726
1727 There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs to
1728 read corrupted process output.
1729
1730 *** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption.
1731
1732 If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupted
1733 due to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc.
1734
1735 To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it
1736 executable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name of
1737 the script:
1738
1739 #!/bin/bash
1740 exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
1741 exec ssh "$@"
1742
1743 *** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1744 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1745
1746 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1747 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1748 known to work.
1749
1750 *** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
1751 the Meta key stops working.
1752
1753 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1754 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1755 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1756 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1757 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1758 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1759 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1760
1761 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1762 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1763 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1764 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1765 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1766 modifier:
1767
1768 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1769
1770 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1771 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1772
1773 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1774
1775 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1776 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1777 keys can serve as Meta.
1778
1779 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1780 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1781
1782 *** GNU/Linux: slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
1783
1784 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
1785 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
1786
1787 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
1788 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
1789 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
1790 networked and non-networked machines.
1791
1792 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
1793
1794 **** Networked Case.
1795
1796 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
1797 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
1798 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
1799
1800 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
1801
1802 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
1803 lines:
1804
1805 order hosts, bind
1806 multi on
1807
1808 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
1809 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
1810 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
1811 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
1812
1813 **** Non-Networked Case.
1814
1815 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
1816 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
1817 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
1818 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
1819 file is not necessary with this approach.
1820
1821 *** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
1822
1823 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
1824 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
1825 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
1826 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
1827 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
1828 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
1829 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
1830 always blinks.
1831
1832 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
1833 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
1834 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
1835 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
1836 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
1837 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
1838
1839 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
1840 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
1841 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
1842 produce a modified terminfo entry.
1843
1844 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
1845 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
1846
1847 *** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1848
1849 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1850 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1851 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1852 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1853
1854 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1855
1856 ** Mac OS X
1857
1858 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Environment Variables from dotfiles are ignored.
1859
1860 When starting Emacs from the Dock or the Finder on Mac OS X, the
1861 environment variables that are set up in dotfiles, such as .cshrc or
1862 .profile, are ignored. This is because the Finder and Dock are not
1863 started from a shell, but instead from the Window Manager itself.
1864
1865 The workaround for this is to create a .MacOSX/environment.plist file to
1866 setup these environment variables. These environment variables will
1867 apply to all processes regardless of where they are started.
1868 For me information, see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html.
1869
1870 *** Mac OS X (Carbon): Process output truncated when using ptys.
1871
1872 There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
1873 Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
1874 leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
1875
1876 *** Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Carbon): QuickTime updater breaks build.
1877
1878 Some QuickTime updaters such as 7.0.4 and 7.2.0 are known to break
1879 build at the link stage with the message like "Undefined symbols:
1880 _HICopyAccessibilityActionDescription referenced from QuickTime
1881 expected to be defined in Carbon". A workaround is to use a QuickTime
1882 reinstaller. Alternatively, you can link with the frameworks in the
1883 corresponding SDK by specifying LDFLAGS as
1884 "-Wl,-F/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.3.0.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks".
1885
1886 ** FreeBSD
1887
1888 *** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1889 directories that have the +t bit.
1890
1891 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1892 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1893 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1894 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1895
1896 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1897 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1898
1899 *** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
1900
1901 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
1902 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
1903 current keymap to a file with the command
1904
1905 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
1906
1907 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
1908 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
1909 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
1910 to look like this
1911
1912 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
1913
1914 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
1915
1916 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
1917
1918 ** HP-UX
1919
1920 *** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
1921
1922 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
1923
1924 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
1925 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
1926 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
1927 but tty is giving it back 3.
1928
1929 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
1930 word:
1931
1932 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
1933
1934 should be changed to:
1935
1936 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
1937
1938 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
1939 and into .login.
1940
1941 *** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
1942
1943 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
1944 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
1945 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
1946 value is just ten seconds.
1947
1948 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
1949
1950 *** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
1951 other non-English HP keyboards too).
1952
1953 This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
1954 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
1955 configures the X server.
1956
1957 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1958 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1959 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1960 EOF
1961
1962 xmodmap - << EOF
1963 clear mod1
1964 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1965 add mod1 = Meta_L
1966 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1967 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1968 EOF
1969
1970 *** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
1971 Emacs built with Motif.
1972
1973 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1974 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1975
1976 *** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
1977
1978 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1979 rights, containing this text:
1980
1981 --------------------------------
1982 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1983 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1984 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1985 EOF
1986
1987 xmodmap - << EOF
1988 clear mod1
1989 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1990 add mod1 = Meta_L
1991 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1992 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1993 EOF
1994 --------------------------------
1995
1996 *** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
1997
1998 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1999
2000 ** AIX
2001
2002 *** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
2003
2004 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2005 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2006
2007 *** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
2008
2009 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
2010
2011 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
2012 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
2013
2014 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
2015
2016 *** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
2017 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
2018 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
2019 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
2020
2021 *** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
2022
2023 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
2024 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
2025 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
2026 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
2027
2028 *** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
2029 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
2030
2031 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
2032 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
2033 Definitions" to make them defined.
2034
2035 ** Solaris
2036
2037 We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
2038 section on legacy systems.
2039
2040 *** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2041
2042 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2043 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2044
2045 *** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2046
2047 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2048 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2049 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2050 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2051
2052 *** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
2053
2054 We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
2055 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
2056 makes the problem stop:
2057
2058 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
2059 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
2060 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
2061 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
2062
2063 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
2064 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
2065
2066 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
2067 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
2068 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
2069
2070 *** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
2071
2072 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
2073 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
2074
2075 *** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
2076 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
2077
2078 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
2079
2080 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
2081
2082 *** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
2083 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
2084
2085 You can fix this by editing the file:
2086
2087 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
2088
2089 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
2090
2091 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2092
2093 that should read:
2094
2095 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
2096
2097 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
2098
2099 *** On Solaris, Emacs fails to set menu-bar-update-hook on startup, with error
2100 "Error in menu-bar-update-hook: (error Point before start of properties)".
2101 This seems to be a GCC optimization bug that occurs for GCC 4.1.2 (-g
2102 and -g -O2) and GCC 4.2.3 (-g -O and -g -O2). You can fix this by
2103 compiling with GCC 4.2.3 or CC 5.7, with no optimizations.
2104
2105 ** Irix
2106
2107 *** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
2108
2109 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
2110
2111 *** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
2112
2113 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2114 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2115 to allocate ptys reliably.
2116
2117 * Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
2118
2119 ** Windows 95 and networking.
2120
2121 To support server sockets, Emacs 22.1 loads ws2_32.dll. If this file
2122 is missing, all Emacs networking features are disabled.
2123
2124 Old versions of Windows 95 may not have the required DLL. To use
2125 Emacs' networking features on Windows 95, you must install the
2126 "Windows Socket 2" update available from MicroSoft's support Web.
2127
2128 ** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
2129
2130 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
2131 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
2132 problem.
2133
2134 ** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 22.1
2135
2136 Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameter
2137 with a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems.
2138 Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control over
2139 which font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character,
2140 use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset.
2141
2142 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
2143 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
2144 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
2145 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
2146 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
2147 pop-up menu interaction.
2148
2149 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
2150 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
2151
2152 When "ClearType" method is selected as the "method to smooth edges of
2153 screen fonts" (in Display Properties, Appearance tab, under
2154 "Effects"), there are various problems related to display of
2155 characters: 2-pixel trace is left behind when moving overlays, bold
2156 fonts can be hard to read, small portions of some characters could
2157 appear chopped, etc. This happens because, under ClearType,
2158 characters are drawn outside their advertised bounding box. Emacs 21
2159 disabled the use of ClearType, whereas Emacs 22 allows it and has some
2160 code to enlarge the width of the bounding box. Apparently, this
2161 display feature needs more changes to get it 100% right. A workaround
2162 is to disable ClearType.
2163
2164 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
2165 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
2166 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
2167 after moving back into it.
2168
2169 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
2170 not as severely as in 21.1.
2171
2172 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
2173 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
2174
2175 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. However, some
2176 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
2177 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
2178 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make these
2179 input methods work with Emacs, set the keyboard coding system to the
2180 appropriate value after you activate the Windows input method. For
2181 example, if you activate the Hebrew input method, type this:
2182
2183 C-x RET k hebrew-iso-8bit RET
2184
2185 (Emacs ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up
2186 the appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do
2187 that yet.) In addition, to use these Windows input methods, you
2188 should set your "Language for non-Unicode programs" (on Windows XP,
2189 this is on the Advanced tab of Regional Settings) to the language of
2190 the input method.
2191
2192 To bind keys that produce non-ASCII characters with modifiers, you
2193 must specify raw byte codes. For instance, if you want to bind
2194 META-a-grave to a command, you need to specify this in your `~/.emacs':
2195
2196 (global-set-key [?\M-\340] ...)
2197
2198 The above example is for the Latin-1 environment where the byte code
2199 of the encoded a-grave is 340 octal. For other environments, use the
2200 encoding appropriate to that environment.
2201
2202 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
2203 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
2204 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
2205 library function.
2206
2207 The function set-time-zone-rule gives incorrect results for many
2208 non-US timezones. This is due to over-simplistic handling of
2209 daylight savings switchovers by the Windows libraries.
2210
2211 Files larger than 4GB cause overflow in the size (represented as a
2212 32-bit integer) reported by `file-attributes'. This affects Dired as
2213 well, since the Windows port uses a Lisp emulation of `ls' that relies
2214 on `file-attributes'.
2215
2216 Sound playing is not supported with the `:data DATA' key-value pair.
2217 You _must_ use the `:file FILE' method.
2218
2219 ** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
2220
2221 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
2222 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
2223 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
2224 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
2225 or disable it in the "Regional and Language Options" applet of the
2226 Control Panel. (The exact sequence of mouse clicks in the "Regional
2227 and Language Options" applet needed to find the key combination that
2228 changes the keyboard layout depends on your Windows version; for XP,
2229 in the Languages tab, click "Details" and then "Key Settings".)
2230
2231 ** Cygwin build of Emacs hangs after rebasing Cygwin DLLs
2232
2233 Usually, on Cygwin, one needs to rebase the DLLs if an application
2234 aborts with a message like this:
2235
2236 C:\cygwin\bin\python.exe: *** unable to remap C:\cygwin\bin\cygssl.dll to
2237 same address as parent(0xDF0000) != 0xE00000
2238
2239 However, since Cygwin DLL 1.5.17 was released, after such rebasing,
2240 Emacs hangs.
2241
2242 This was reported to happen for Emacs 21.2 and also for the pretest of
2243 Emacs 22.1 on Cygwin.
2244
2245 To work around this, build Emacs like this:
2246
2247 LDFLAGS='-Wl,--enable-auto-import -Wl,--enable-auto-image-base' ./configure
2248 make LD='$(CC)'
2249 make LD='$(CC)' install
2250
2251 This produces an Emacs binary that is independent of rebasing.
2252
2253 Note that you _must_ use LD='$(CC)' in the last two commands above, to
2254 prevent GCC from passing the "--image-base 0x20000000" option to the
2255 linker, which is what it does by default. That option produces an
2256 Emacs binary with the base address 0x20000000, which will cause Emacs
2257 to hang after Cygwin DLLs are rebased.
2258
2259 ** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
2260
2261 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
2262 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
2263 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
2264 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
2265 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
2266
2267 ** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2268
2269 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
2270 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
2271 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
2272 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
2273 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
2274 confuses ange-ftp.
2275
2276 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
2277 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
2278 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
2279 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
2280 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
2281 client's executable. For example:
2282
2283 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
2284
2285 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
2286 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
2287
2288 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
2289
2290 ** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
2291
2292 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
2293 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
2294
2295 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
2296 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
2297 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
2298 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
2299 has):
2300
2301 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
2302 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
2303 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
2304 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
2305
2306 ** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
2307
2308 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
2309 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
2310 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
2311 work when an antivirus package is installed.
2312
2313 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
2314 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
2315 or disable it entirely.
2316
2317 ** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
2318
2319 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
2320 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
2321 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
2322 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
2323 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
2324 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
2325 generic mouse driver might help.
2326
2327 ** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
2328
2329 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
2330 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
2331 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
2332 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
2333
2334 ** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
2335 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
2336 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
2337 seen.
2338
2339 ** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
2340 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
2341
2342 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
2343
2344 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
2345 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
2346 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
2347 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
2348 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
2349 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
2350
2351 ** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
2352
2353 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
2354 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
2355 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
2356 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
2357
2358 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
2359 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
2360 problem lies in the X-server settings.
2361
2362 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
2363 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
2364 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
2365 selection".
2366
2367 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
2368 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
2369 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
2370 here.
2371
2372 * Build-time problems
2373
2374 ** Configuration
2375
2376 *** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
2377
2378 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
2379 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
2380 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
2381
2382 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
2383 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
2384 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
2385 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
2386 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
2387 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
2388
2389 *** `configure' warns ``accepted by the compiler, rejected by the preprocessor''.
2390
2391 This indicates a mismatch between the C compiler and preprocessor that
2392 configure is using. For example, on Solaris 10 trying to use
2393 CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc (the Sun Studio compiler) together with
2394 CPP=/usr/ccs/lib/cpp can result in errors of this form (you may also
2395 see the error ``"/usr/include/sys/isa_defs.h", line 500: undefined control'').
2396
2397 The solution is to tell configure to use the correct C preprocessor
2398 for your C compiler (CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E" in the above
2399 example).
2400
2401 *** `configure' fails with ``"junk.c", line 660: invalid input token: 8.elc''
2402
2403 The final stage of the Emacs configure process uses the C preprocessor
2404 to generate the Makefiles. Errors of this form can occur if the C
2405 preprocessor inserts extra whitespace into its output. The solution
2406 is to find the switches that stop your preprocessor from inserting extra
2407 whitespace, add them to CPPFLAGS, and re-run configure. For example,
2408 this error can occur on Solaris 10 when using the Sun Studio compiler
2409 ``Sun C 5.8'' with its preprocessor CPP="/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc -E".
2410 The relevant switch in this case is "-Xs" (``compile assuming
2411 (pre-ANSI) K & R C style code'').
2412
2413 ** Compilation
2414
2415 *** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
2416
2417 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
2418 (Red Hat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
2419 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
2420 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
2421 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
2422 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
2423 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
2424 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
2425
2426 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
2427 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
2428 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
2429 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
2430
2431 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
2432 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
2433 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
2434 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
2435 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
2436 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
2437 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
2438 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
2439 `/etc/auto.home'.
2440
2441 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
2442 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
2443 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
2444 to work around the problem.
2445
2446 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
2447 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
2448 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
2449 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
2450
2451 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
2452
2453 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
2454
2455 *** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
2456
2457 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
2458 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
2459 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
2460 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
2461 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
2462 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
2463 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
2464 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
2465 variables).
2466
2467 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
2468 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
2469 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
2470 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
2471 run the script like this:
2472
2473 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
2474
2475 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
2476 the script).
2477
2478 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
2479 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
2480
2481 *** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2482 *** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2483
2484 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2485 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
2486 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2487 configure script.
2488
2489 *** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2490
2491 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2492 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2493 Emacs's configure script.
2494
2495 *** Building a 32-bit executable on a 64-bit GNU/Linux architecture.
2496
2497 First ensure that the necessary 32-bit system libraries and include
2498 files are installed. Then use:
2499
2500 env CC="gcc -m32" ./configure --build=i386-linux-gnu \
2501 --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
2502
2503 (using the location of the 32-bit X libraries on your system).
2504
2505 *** Building the Cygwin port for MS-Windows can fail with some GCC versions
2506
2507 Building Emacs 22 with Cygwin builds of GCC 3.4.4-1 and 3.4.4-2 is
2508 reported to either fail or cause Emacs to segfault at run time. In
2509 addition, the Cygwin GCC 3.4.4-2 has problems with generating debug
2510 info. Cygwin users are advised not to use these versions of GCC for
2511 compiling Emacs. GCC versions 4.0.3, 4.0.4, 4.1.1, and 4.1.2
2512 reportedly build a working Cygwin binary of Emacs, so we recommend
2513 these GCC versions. Note that these versions of GCC, 4.0.3, 4.0.4,
2514 4.1.1, and 4.1.2, are currently the _only_ versions known to succeed
2515 in building Emacs (as of v22.1).
2516
2517 *** Building the native MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
2518
2519 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
2520 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
2521 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
2522 __MSVCRT__, like so:
2523
2524 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
2525
2526 *** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
2527
2528 Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
2529 to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
2530 fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
2531
2532 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
2533
2534 The error message might be something like this:
2535
2536 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
2537 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
2538 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
2539 '0xffffffff'
2540 Stop.
2541
2542 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
2543 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
2544 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
2545 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
2546 or EOL conversions.
2547
2548 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
2549 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
2550 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
2551 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
2552 mangling them.
2553
2554 *** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
2555
2556 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
2557 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
2558 patch to assert.h should solve this:
2559
2560 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
2561 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
2562 ***************
2563 *** 41,47 ****
2564 /*
2565 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2566 */
2567 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
2568
2569 #else /* debugging enabled */
2570
2571 --- 41,47 ----
2572 /*
2573 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
2574 */
2575 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
2576
2577 #else /* debugging enabled */
2578
2579
2580 *** Building the MS-Windows port with Visual Studio 2005 fails.
2581
2582 Microsoft no longer ships the single threaded version of the C library
2583 with their compiler, and the multithreaded static library is missing
2584 some functions that Microsoft have deemed non-threadsafe. The
2585 dynamically linked C library has all the functions, but there is a
2586 conflict between the versions of malloc in the DLL and in Emacs, which
2587 is not resolvable due to the way Windows does dynamic linking.
2588
2589 We recommend the use of the MingW port of GCC for compiling Emacs, as
2590 not only does it not suffer these problems, but it is also Free
2591 software like Emacs.
2592
2593 ** Linking
2594
2595 *** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
2596 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
2597
2598 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
2599 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
2600 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
2601 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
2602 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
2603 link stage.
2604
2605 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
2606
2607 make CC=gcc
2608
2609 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
2610 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
2611
2612 *** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
2613
2614 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2615 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2616 workaround/fix is:
2617
2618 cd /lib
2619 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2620 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2621
2622 *** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
2623 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2624 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2625
2626 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2627 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2628 you build Emacs:
2629
2630 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2631 chmod 664 libIM.a
2632 ranlib libIM.a
2633
2634 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2635 Makefile).
2636
2637 *** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2638
2639 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2640
2641 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2642
2643 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2644
2645 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2646 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2647
2648 *** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2649
2650 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2651
2652 *** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
2653
2654 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
2655 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
2656 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
2657 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
2658 does not work with this version of ncurses.
2659
2660 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
2661
2662 ** Dumping
2663
2664 *** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
2665
2666 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Red Hat Fedora Core
2667 1 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
2668 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs tries
2669 to handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, these
2670 instructions can be useful.
2671 The work-around explained here is not enough on Fedora Core 4 (and possible
2672 newer). Read the next item.
2673
2674 Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
2675 x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
2676 workaround is known.
2677
2678 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
2679
2680 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2681
2682 It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
2683 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
2684 associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
2685
2686 echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
2687
2688 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
2689 execution of this command:
2690
2691 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2692
2693 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
2694 Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
2695 command when running temacs like this:
2696
2697 setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2698
2699
2700 *** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.
2701
2702 In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during
2703 `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel"
2704 item, Linux kernel shipped with Fedora Core 4 randomizes the virtual
2705 address space of a process. As the result dumping may fail even if
2706 you turn off exec-shield. In this case, use the -R option to the setarch
2707 command:
2708
2709 setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
2710
2711 or
2712
2713 setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
2714
2715 *** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
2716
2717 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2718 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2719
2720 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2721 space available on the machine.
2722
2723 On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2724 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2725 for large blocks (many pages).
2726
2727 *** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
2728 *** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
2729 *** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2730 *** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
2731
2732 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2733 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2734 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2735
2736 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2737 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2738 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2739 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2740 when unpacking the shell archive.
2741
2742 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2743 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2744 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2745
2746 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2747 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2748
2749 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2750 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2751 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2752 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2753 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2754 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2755 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2756 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2757 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2758 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2759 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2760 and remake temacs.
2761 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2762
2763 *** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
2764
2765 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2766 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2767 space than was allocated.
2768
2769 This could be caused by
2770 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2771 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2772 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2773 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2774 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2775 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2776 deleting that file.
2777 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2778 (not from the directory you expected).
2779 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2780 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2781 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2782 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2783 the space required.
2784
2785 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2786 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2787
2788 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2789 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2790 problem.
2791
2792 *** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
2793
2794 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
2795 C backtrace printed by GDB:
2796
2797 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2798 (gdb) where
2799 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
2800 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
2801 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
2802 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
2803
2804 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
2805 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
2806 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
2807 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
2808 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
2809 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
2810 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
2811 distribution:
2812
2813 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
2814 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
2815 know what's really going on here. */
2816 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
2817 0x10000000. */
2818 #if defined __linux__
2819 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
2820 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
2821 #endif
2822 #endif
2823 #endif /* 0 */
2824
2825 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
2826 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
2827 should now succeed.
2828
2829 *** OpenBSD 4.0 macppc: Segfault during dumping.
2830
2831 The build aborts with signal 11 when the command `./temacs --batch
2832 --load loadup bootstrap' tries to load files.el. A workaround seems
2833 to be to reduce the level of compiler optimization used during the
2834 build (from -O2 to -O1). It is possible this is an OpenBSD
2835 GCC problem specific to the macppc architecture, possibly only
2836 occurring with older versions of GCC (e.g. 3.3.5).
2837
2838 *** openSUSE 10.3: Segfault in bcopy during dumping.
2839
2840 This is due to a bug in the bcopy implementation in openSUSE 10.3.
2841 It is/will be fixed in an openSUSE update.
2842
2843 ** Installation
2844
2845 *** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
2846
2847 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
2848 supplies the `install-info' command.
2849
2850 *** Installing to a directory with spaces in the name fails.
2851
2852 For example, if you call configure with a directory-related option
2853 with spaces in the value, eg --enable-locallisppath='/path/with\ spaces'.
2854 Using directory paths with spaces is not supported at this time: you
2855 must re-configure without using spaces.
2856
2857 *** Installing to a directory with non-ASCII characters in the name fails.
2858
2859 Installation may fail, or the Emacs executable may not start
2860 correctly, if a directory name containing non-ASCII characters is used
2861 as a `configure' argument (e.g. `--prefix'). The problem can also
2862 occur if a non-ASCII directory is specified in the EMACSLOADPATH
2863 envvar.
2864
2865 *** On Solaris, use GNU Make when installing an out-of-tree build
2866
2867 The Emacs configuration process allows you to configure the
2868 build environment so that you can build emacs in a directory
2869 outside of the distribution tree. When installing Emacs from an
2870 out-of-tree build directory on Solaris, you may need to use GNU
2871 make. The make programs bundled with Solaris support the VPATH
2872 macro but use it differently from the way the VPATH macro is
2873 used by GNU make. The differences will cause the "make install"
2874 step to fail, leaving you with an incomplete emacs
2875 installation. GNU make is available in /usr/sfw/bin on Solaris
2876 10 and can be installed as /opt/sfw/bin/gmake from the Solaris 9
2877 Software Companion CDROM.
2878
2879 The problems due to the VPATH processing differences affect only
2880 out of tree builds so, if you are on a Solaris installation
2881 without GNU make, you can install Emacs completely by installing
2882 from a build environment using the original emacs distribution tree.
2883
2884 ** First execution
2885
2886 *** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
2887
2888 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
2889 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
2890 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
2891 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
2892
2893 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
2894
2895 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
2896 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
2897
2898 *** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2899
2900 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2901
2902 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2903 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2904 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2905 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2906
2907 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2908 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2909 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2910 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2911 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2912
2913 * Emacs 19 problems
2914
2915 ** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
2916
2917 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2918 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2919 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2920 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2921
2922 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2923
2924 * Runtime problems on legacy systems
2925
2926 This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
2927 If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
2928 it is unlikely you will see any of these.
2929
2930 ** Ancient operating systems
2931
2932 AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
2933
2934 *** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
2935
2936 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2937 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2938
2939 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2940 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2941 X11Dev... with smit.
2942
2943 (This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
2944
2945 *** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2946
2947 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2948 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2949 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2950 treated as control characters.
2951
2952 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2953 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2954
2955 *** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
2956
2957 Could not load program emacs
2958 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2959 Error was: Exec format error
2960
2961 or this one:
2962
2963 Could not load program .emacs
2964 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2965 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2966 Error was: Exec format error
2967
2968 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2969 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2970
2971 *** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
2972
2973 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
2974 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
2975
2976 *** ISC Unix
2977
2978 **** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2979
2980 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2981 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2982 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2983 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2984 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2985
2986 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2987 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2988
2989 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2990
2991 *** SunOS
2992
2993 SunOS 4.1.4 stopped shipping on Sep 30 1998.
2994
2995 **** SunOS: You get linker errors
2996 ld: Undefined symbol
2997 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
2998 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
2999
3000 **** Sun 4.0.x: M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
3001
3002 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
3003 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
3004
3005 **** SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3: Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
3006
3007 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
3008 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
3009 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
3010 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
3011 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
3012 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
3013 obtain the destination address.
3014
3015 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
3016 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
3017 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
3018 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
3019 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
3020 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
3021 of this writing, these official versions are available:
3022
3023 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
3024 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
3025 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
3026 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
3027 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
3028
3029 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
3030 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
3031
3032 **** Sunos 4: You get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
3033
3034 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
3035 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
3036 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
3037
3038 **** SunOS 4.1.3: Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
3039
3040 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
3041 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
3042 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
3043 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
3044
3045 **** Sunos 4.1.3: Emacs gets hung shortly after startup.
3046
3047 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
3048 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
3049
3050 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
3051 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
3052 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
3053 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
3054 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
3055
3056 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
3057 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
3058
3059 **** SunOS 4: Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
3060 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
3061
3062 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
3063
3064 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
3065 or link libXmu statically.
3066
3067 **** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
3068
3069 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
3070 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
3071 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
3072 communicating through pipes.
3073
3074 *** Apollo Domain
3075
3076 **** Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain.
3077
3078 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
3079
3080 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
3081
3082 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
3083 Here is how to make more of them.
3084
3085 % cd /dev
3086 % ls pty*
3087 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
3088 % /etc/crpty 8
3089 # creates eight new pty's
3090
3091 *** Irix
3092
3093 *** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
3094
3095 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
3096 as of 8 Dec 1998.
3097
3098 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
3099
3100 *** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
3101 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
3102
3103 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
3104
3105 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
3106 003082 August 11, 1998.
3107
3108 *** OPENSTEP
3109
3110 **** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
3111
3112 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
3113 following message:
3114
3115 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
3116
3117 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
3118 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
3119 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
3120
3121 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
3122 {
3123 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
3124 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
3125
3126 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
3127 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
3128
3129 *** Solaris 2.x
3130
3131 **** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
3132
3133 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
3134 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
3135 as GCC.
3136
3137 **** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
3138
3139 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
3140 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
3141 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
3142
3143 **** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
3144
3145 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
3146 version of Solaris that you are using.
3147
3148 **** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
3149
3150 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
3151 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
3152
3153 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
3154
3155 **** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
3156
3157 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
3158 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
3159 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
3160 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
3161 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
3162
3163 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
3164 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
3165 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
3166 for certain.
3167
3168 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
3169 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
3170 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
3171
3172 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
3173 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
3174
3175 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
3176 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
3177
3178 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
3179 Solaris 2.5.
3180
3181 **** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
3182 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
3183
3184 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
3185 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
3186
3187 #if ThreadedX
3188 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3189 #endif
3190
3191 to:
3192
3193 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
3194 #if ThreadedX
3195 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
3196 #endif
3197 #endif
3198
3199 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
3200 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
3201 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
3202 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
3203 definition for your type of machine and system.
3204
3205 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
3206 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
3207 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
3208
3209 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
3210 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
3211 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
3212 patch.
3213
3214 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
3215 he changed
3216 #define ThreadedX YES
3217 to
3218 #define ThreadedX NO
3219 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
3220 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
3221 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
3222
3223 **** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
3224
3225 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
3226 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
3227 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
3228 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
3229 described in the Solaris FAQ
3230 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
3231 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
3232
3233 **** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
3234 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
3235 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
3236 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
3237 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
3238 and the default CFLAGS.
3239
3240 **** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
3241
3242 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
3243 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
3244 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
3245 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
3246 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
3247 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
3248 are currently recommended for your host.
3249
3250 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
3251 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
3252 105284-18 might fix it again.
3253
3254 **** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
3255
3256 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
3257 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
3258 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
3259 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
3260
3261 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
3262 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
3263 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
3264 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
3265 should do.
3266
3267 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
3268 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
3269 libraries.
3270
3271 *** HP/UX versions before 11.0
3272
3273 HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
3274 HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
3275
3276 **** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
3277
3278 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
3279 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
3280 does not happen.
3281
3282 *** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
3283
3284 See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
3285
3286 *** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
3287
3288 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
3289 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
3290 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
3291 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
3292 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
3293 install them and rebuild Emacs.
3294
3295 *** Ultrix and Digital Unix
3296
3297 **** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
3298
3299 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
3300 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
3301 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
3302 hand.
3303
3304 **** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
3305
3306 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
3307 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
3308 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
3309 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
3310 in Emacs.
3311
3312 **** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
3313
3314 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
3315 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
3316 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
3317 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
3318
3319 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
3320 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
3321
3322 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
3323 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
3324 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
3325 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
3326
3327 *** SVr4
3328
3329 **** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
3330
3331 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
3332 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
3333 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
3334
3335 **** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
3336
3337 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
3338 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
3339 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
3340
3341 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
3342 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
3343 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
3344 configure script) that reads:
3345 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
3346 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
3347 the kernel bug.
3348
3349 *** Irix 5 and earlier
3350
3351 Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
3352 shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
3353
3354 **** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
3355
3356 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
3357 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
3358 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
3359 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
3360 syms.h.
3361
3362 **** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
3363
3364 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
3365 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
3366 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
3367 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
3368 command `swap -l'.
3369
3370 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
3371 line like this:
3372
3373 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
3374
3375 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
3376 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
3377 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
3378 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
3379 information.
3380
3381 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
3382 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
3383 on the network that can log on to the host.
3384
3385 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
3386 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
3387 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
3388 icons.
3389
3390 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
3391 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
3392 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
3393 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
3394
3395 **** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
3396
3397 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
3398 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
3399
3400 **** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
3401
3402 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
3403 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
3404 find that string, and take out the spaces.
3405
3406 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
3407
3408 *** SCO Unix and UnixWare
3409
3410 **** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
3411
3412 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
3413 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
3414 fonts, so it does not work.
3415
3416 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
3417 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
3418 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
3419 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
3420 resources affect Emacs also:
3421
3422 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
3423 *Background: scoBackground
3424 *Foreground: scoForeground
3425
3426 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
3427 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
3428
3429 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
3430 Emacs*Background: white
3431 Emacs*Foreground: black
3432
3433 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
3434 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
3435 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
3436 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
3437 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
3438 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
3439 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
3440 Open Desktop display.
3441
3442 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
3443 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
3444
3445 **** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
3446
3447 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
3448 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
3449 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
3450 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
3451 GCC.
3452
3453 **** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
3454
3455 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
3456 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
3457 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
3458 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
3459 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
3460 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
3461
3462 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
3463 But you have to be root to do it.
3464
3465 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
3466
3467 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
3468 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
3469 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
3470 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
3471 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
3472
3473 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
3474 These changes take effect when you reboot.
3475
3476 *** Linux 1.x
3477
3478 **** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
3479
3480 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
3481 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
3482 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
3483
3484 **** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
3485 truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
3486
3487 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
3488 1.3.75.
3489
3490 ** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
3491
3492 *** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
3493
3494 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
3495 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
3496
3497 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
3498 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
3499 with the user.
3500
3501 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
3502 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
3503 communicate with the subprocess.
3504
3505 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
3506 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
3507 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
3508 stdin.
3509
3510 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
3511
3512 For Perl 4:
3513
3514 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
3515 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
3516 ***************
3517 *** 68,74 ****
3518 $rcfile=".perldb";
3519 }
3520 else {
3521 ! $console = "con";
3522 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3523 }
3524
3525 --- 68,74 ----
3526 $rcfile=".perldb";
3527 }
3528 else {
3529 ! $console = "";
3530 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3531 }
3532
3533
3534 For Perl 5:
3535 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
3536 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
3537 ***************
3538 *** 22,28 ****
3539 $rcfile=".perldb";
3540 }
3541 elsif (-e "con") {
3542 ! $console = "con";
3543 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3544 }
3545 else {
3546 --- 22,28 ----
3547 $rcfile=".perldb";
3548 }
3549 elsif (-e "con") {
3550 ! $console = "";
3551 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
3552 }
3553 else {
3554
3555 *** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
3556
3557 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
3558 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
3559
3560 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
3561
3562 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
3563 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
3564 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
3565 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
3566
3567 *** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
3568
3569 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
3570 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
3571 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
3572 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
3573 PATH.
3574
3575 ** MS-DOS
3576
3577 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
3578
3579 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
3580 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
3581 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
3582 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
3583 the front of your PATH environment variable.
3584
3585 *** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
3586 like make-docfile.
3587
3588 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
3589 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
3590 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
3591 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
3592
3593 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
3594
3595 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
3596
3597 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
3598 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
3599 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
3600 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
3601 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
3602 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
3603 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
3604 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
3605 your system works as before.
3606
3607 *** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
3608
3609 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
3610 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
3611 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
3612 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
3613 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
3614
3615 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
3616 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
3617 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
3618 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
3619
3620 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
3621 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
3622 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
3623 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
3624 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
3625
3626 *** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
3627 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
3628 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
3629
3630 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
3631 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
3632 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
3633
3634 *** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
3635
3636 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
3637
3638 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
3639 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
3640 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
3641
3642 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
3643 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
3644 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
3645 incorrect library functions.
3646
3647 *** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
3648 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
3649
3650 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
3651 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
3652 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
3653 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
3654
3655 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
3656 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
3657 Lisp.
3658
3659 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
3660 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
3661 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
3662 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
3663 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
3664 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
3665 explains this issue in more detail.
3666
3667 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
3668 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
3669 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
3670 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
3671 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
3672 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
3673 properly truncated.
3674
3675 ** Archaic window managers and toolkits
3676
3677 *** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
3678
3679 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
3680 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
3681 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
3682 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
3683 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
3684
3685 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
3686
3687 **** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
3688
3689 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
3690 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
3691
3692 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
3693
3694 ** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
3695
3696 *** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
3697
3698 This shell command should fix it:
3699
3700 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
3701
3702 *** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
3703 as a concentrator.
3704
3705 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
3706 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
3707
3708 * Build problems on legacy systems
3709
3710 ** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
3711
3712 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
3713 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
3714 such as bash.
3715
3716 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
3717 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
3718
3719 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
3720 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
3721
3722 ** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
3723
3724 This problem manifests itself as an error message
3725
3726 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
3727
3728 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
3729 were built for an older system version,
3730
3731 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
3732
3733 made the problem go away.
3734
3735 ** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
3736
3737 If you get errors such as
3738
3739 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3740 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
3741 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
3742
3743 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
3744 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
3745 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
3746 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
3747 ones available when you build Emacs.
3748
3749 ** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
3750
3751 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
3752
3753 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
3754
3755 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
3756
3757 ** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
3758
3759 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
3760 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
3761 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
3762
3763 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
3764 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
3765
3766 ** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
3767
3768 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
3769 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
3770 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
3771 with a floating point option other than the default.
3772
3773 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
3774 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
3775 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
3776 floating point option: -fsoft.
3777
3778 ** SunOS: Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose.
3779
3780 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
3781 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
3782 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
3783 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
3784 toolkit.)
3785
3786 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
3787 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
3788 X11R4, then use it in the link.
3789
3790 ** SunOS4, DGUX 5.4.2: --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
3791
3792 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
3793 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
3794 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
3795 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
3796 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
3797 and Solaris in version 19.29.
3798
3799 ** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
3800
3801 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
3802
3803 ** VMS: Compilation errors on VMS.
3804
3805 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
3806 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
3807 This is not an error. Ignore it.
3808
3809 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
3810 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
3811
3812 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
3813 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
3814 char c = -1, d = 1;
3815 int i;
3816
3817 i = d ? c : d;
3818 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
3819 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
3820 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
3821
3822 ** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3823
3824 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3825
3826 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3827 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3828
3829 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3830 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3831 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3832 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3833 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3834 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3835 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3836
3837 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3838 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3839 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3840 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3841 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3842 Lisp_Object *args;
3843 ...
3844 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3845 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3846 Lisp_Object *args;
3847 Lisp_Object tem;
3848 ...
3849 tem = args[i];
3850 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3851 causes the problem to go away.
3852 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3853 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3854
3855 ** 68000 C compiler problems
3856
3857 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3858 These are some that have been observed.
3859
3860 *** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3861 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3862 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3863
3864 *** "cannot reclaim" error.
3865
3866 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3867 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3868 simpler expressions.
3869
3870 *** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3871
3872 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3873 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3874
3875 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3876
3877 lose (arg)
3878 struct foo arg;
3879 {
3880 test ((int *) arg.y);
3881 }
3882
3883 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3884 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3885 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3886
3887 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3888 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3889
3890 *** C compilers lose on returning unions.
3891
3892 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3893 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3894 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3895
3896 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3897 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3898
3899 \f
3900 This file is part of GNU Emacs.
3901
3902 GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
3903 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
3904 the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
3905 any later version.
3906
3907 GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
3908 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
3909 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
3910 GNU General Public License for more details.
3911
3912 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
3913 along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
3914 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
3915 Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
3916
3917 \f
3918 Local variables:
3919 mode: outline
3920 paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
3921 end:
3922
3923 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a