This file describes various problems that have been encountered
-in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
+in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-t
+and browsing through the outline headers.
-* Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
+* Emacs startup failures
-This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
-of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
-version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
-dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
-around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
-incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
-". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
-directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
-variables).
+** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
-The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
-`-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
-when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
-unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
-run the script like this:
+A typical error message might be something like
- CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
+ No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
-(replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
-the script).
+This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
+Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
+are:
-Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
-Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
+ - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
-* Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
-undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
+ - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
+ /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
+ /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
-This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
-with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
-GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
-from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
-compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
-link stage.
+One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
+fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
+the problematic line(s) and correct them.
-A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
+** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
- make CC=gcc
+This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
+installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
+specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
+corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
+the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
+Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
+files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
+original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
+not to work.
-Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
-with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
+The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
+when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
+is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
+same directory where system header files are kept.
-* Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
+** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
-Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
-version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
-necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
-__MSVCRT__, like so:
+If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
+systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
+ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
+cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
+libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
+obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
- configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
+The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
+the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
+symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
+it constitutes a separate package.
-* Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
+** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
-The error message might be something like this:
+The typical error message might be like this:
- Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
- Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
- NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
- '0xffffffff'
- Stop.
+ "Cannot open load file: fontset"
-This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
-which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
-`*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
-endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
-or EOL conversions.
+This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
+tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
+files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
+Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
+when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
+required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
+it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
-The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
-change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
-in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
-which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
-mangling them.
+Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
+file could fail to load if it is compressed.
-* Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
+The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
+file.
-The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
-C backtrace printed by GDB:
+Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
+lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
+print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
- 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
- (gdb) where
- #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
- #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
- #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
- #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
+ emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
-This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
-of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
-but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
-other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
-distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
-GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
-following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
-distribution:
+If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
+and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
+load-path.
- #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
- even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
- know what's really going on here. */
- /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
- 0x10000000. */
- #if defined __linux__
- #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
- #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
- #endif
- #endif
- #endif /* 0 */
+** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
-Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
-the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
-should now succeed.
+An example of such an error is:
-* JPEG images aren't displayed.
+ x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
-This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
-Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem.
+This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.
+The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
+present in load-path:
-* Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
+ emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
-This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
-defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
-patch to assert.h should solve this:
+If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
+and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
+load-path.
-*** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
---- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
-***************
-*** 41,47 ****
- /*
- * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
- */
-! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
-
- #else /* debugging enabled */
-
---- 41,47 ----
- /*
- * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
- */
-! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
-
- #else /* debugging enabled */
-
+** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
+Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
-* Improving performance with slow X connections
+ --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
+ +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
+ @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
+ -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
+ +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
+ /******************************************************************
-If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
-language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by
-configuring Emacs with option `--without-xim'. Configuring Emacs
-without XIM does not affect the use of Emacs' own input methods, which
-are part of the Leim package.
+ Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
+ @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
+ _XimMakeImName(lcd)
+ XLCd lcd;
+ {
+ - char* begin;
+ - char* end;
+ + char* begin = NULL;
+ + char* end = NULL;
+ char* ret;
+ int i = 0;
+ char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
+ @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
+ }
+ ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
+ if (ret != NULL) {
+ - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
+ + if (begin != NULL) {
+ + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
+ + } else {
+ + ret[0] = '\0';
+ + }
+ ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
+ }
+ return ret;
-If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
-switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
+* Crash bugs
-* Getting a Meta key on the FreeBSD console
+** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
-By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
-FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
-current keymap to a file with the command
+This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
+use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
+an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
+happens to exist on your X server).
- $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
+** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
-Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
-definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
-key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
-to look like this
+This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
+prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
+to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
- 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
+Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
+(src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
-to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
+** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
+a segmentation fault and core dump.
- $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
+This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
+added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
-* Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
+ x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
-A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
-into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
-incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
-other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
-been filed.
+If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
+untar it :-).
-* Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font
+** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
+libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
+Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
+if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
+older version.
-This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
-2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
-event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
-Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
+** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
-A workaround for this is to add something like
+This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
+terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
+If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
+version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
+and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
-emacs.waitForWM: false
+All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
+problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
+terminfo when built.
-to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
-frame's parameter list, like this:
+** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.
- (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
+If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
+reported to prevent the crashes.
-(this should go into your `.emacs' file).
+** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.
-* Underlines appear at the wrong position.
+It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".
-This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
-Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
-neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
-problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
-`.emacs'.
+This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passing
+the -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombreloc
+flag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag is
+necessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.
-To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
-type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
-property.
+On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem by
+configuring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.
-* When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
-click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
-is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
-problem disappears.
+* General runtime problems
-* There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
-XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
-one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
-For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
-"C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
-used with neXtaw at run time.
+** Lisp problems
-The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
-want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
-built Emacs with.
+*** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
-* Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
+You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
+Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
+will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
+and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
-This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
-a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
---without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
-
-* Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
+Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
+than the corresponding .el file.
-This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
-terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
-If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
-version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
-and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
+*** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.
-All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
-problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
-terminfo when built.
+These control the actions of Emacs.
+~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
+EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
+"load" will search.
-* Error messages about undefined colors on X.
+If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
+of them, then try again.
-The messages might say something like this:
+*** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
- Unable to load color "grey95"
+The error message might be something like this:
-(typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
+ "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
- Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
+This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
+built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
+for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
+corrects that.
-These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
-many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
-resources to load all the colors it needs.
+*** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
-A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
+Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
+problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
+documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
-* Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
+*** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
+Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
+`add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
+'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
-Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
-emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
-entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
-"Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
-supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
-Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
-uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
-"colors".
+** Keyboard problems
-In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
-``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
-back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
-use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
-doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
-sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
-it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
-capability).
+*** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
-Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
-attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
-incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
-this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
+If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
+will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
+in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
+did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
+character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
+must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
-Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
-of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
-entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
-`xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
-emulator.
+You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
+them to two different keys.
-Beginning with version 21.3, Emacs supports the --color command-line
-option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
-modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
-for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
+*** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
-Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
-Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
-Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
-recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
-global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
-`global-font-lock-mode'.
+You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
+though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
+or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
-* Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
+*** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
+to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
-This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
-ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
-These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
-the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
-(show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
-blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
-cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
-always blinks.
+This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
+with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
+another escape character in kermit. One user did
-A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
-enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
-the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
-cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
-the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
-cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
+ set escape-character 17
-To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
-`linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
-the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
-produce a modified terminfo entry.
+in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
-Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
-change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
+** Mailers and other helper programs
-* Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
+*** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
-The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
-emulation for which it is set up.
+Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
+NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
+entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
+listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
+the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
+old POP protocol.
-Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
-Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
-On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
---enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
-successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
-lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
-menu placement.
+*** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.
-On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
-locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
-what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
-developers.
+RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
+called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
+the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
-* Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.2.
+There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
+the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
+`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
+this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
+the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
+IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
+SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
-Emacs 21.2 built for MS-Windows doesn't support images and the tool bar.
-Support for these will be added in future versions.
+If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
+prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
+you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
+`mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
-Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
-is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menu items is not
-displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
-synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
-waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
-pop-up menu interaction.
+ chgrp mail movemail
+ chmod 2755 movemail
-There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
-mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
-frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
-after moving back into it.
+If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
+prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
+you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
+`mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
+make install.
-Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
-not as severely as in 21.1.
+ chgrp mail movemail
+ chmod 2755 movemail
-Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
-characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
+Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
+installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
+installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
+/usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
+mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
+directory copy is ineffective.
-An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
-Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
+*** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
-Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.2). Some
-of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
-in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
-characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
-work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
-you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
-the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
-ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
-appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
-yet.)
+This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
+The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
-Multilingual text put into the Windows clipboard by other Windows
-applications cannot be safely pasted into Emacs (as of v21.2). This
-is because Windows uses Unicode to represent multilingual text, but
-Emacs does not yet support Unicode well enough to decode it. This
-means that Emacs can only interchange non-ASCII text with other
-Windows programs if the characters are in the system codepage.
-Reportedly, a partial solution is to install the Mule-UCS package and
-set selection-coding-system to utf-16-le-dos.
+** Problems with hostname resolution
-The %h format specifier for format-time-string does not work on Windows.
-The %b format specifier does not produce abbreviated month names with
-consistent widths for some locales on some versions of Windows. This is
-caused by a deficiency in the underlying system library function.
+*** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
+the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
+*** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
+*** Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
-* The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
+This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
+libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
+shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
+similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
-This can happen because the linker by default only looks for shared
-libraries, but jpeg distribution by default doesn't build and doesn't
-install a shared version of the library, `libjpeg.so'. One system
-where this is known to happen is Compaq OSF/1 (`Tru64'), but it
-probably isn't limited to that system.
+The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
+the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
-You can configure the jpeg library with the `--enable-shared' option
-and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a shared version of libjpeg,
-which you need to install. Finally, rerun the Emacs configure script,
-which should now find the jpeg library. Alternatively, modify the
-generated src/Makefile to link the .a file explicitly.
+The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
+installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
-(If you need the static version of the jpeg library as well, configure
-libjpeg with both `--enable-static' and `--enable-shared' options.)
+On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
-* Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
+If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
+then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
+do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
+or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
+that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
+be careful not to lose the others.
-This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
-(RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
-(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
-configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
-files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
-left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
-itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
-Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
+Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
-In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
-machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
-(it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
-This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
+#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
-If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
-(Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
-you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
-force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
-problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
-blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
-`mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
-options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
-`/etc/auto.home'.
+Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
+the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
+again to say this:
-Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
-a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
-waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
-to work around the problem.
+#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
-Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
-onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
-you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
-`/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
+*** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
- marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
+You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
+either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
+calls for specifying this.
-The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
+If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
+mail-host-address to the value you want.
-* Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
+** NFS and RFS
-This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
-via NFS. Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
-binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
+*** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
+appear on disk.
- emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
+This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
+remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
+implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
+detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
+calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
+where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
-We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
-build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
+*** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
+It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
+but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
+causes it.
-* Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
+ There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
+ call in the RFS server.
-Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
-other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
-that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
-size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
-when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
-fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
+ The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
+ close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
+ many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
+ to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
-To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
+ This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
- xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
+ The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
+ non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
+ gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
+ a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
+ as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
+ is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
+ protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
-If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
-problem.
+ (as always, your line numbers may vary)
-The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
-`fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
-`xset fp rehash'.
+ % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
+ RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
+ retrieving revision 1.2
+ diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
+ *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
+ --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
+ ***************
+ *** 163,169 ****
+ /*
+ * No return sent for close or fsync!
+ */
+ ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
+ proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
+ else
+ {
+ --- 166,172 ----
+ /*
+ * No return sent for close or fsync!
+ */
+ ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
+ proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
+ else
+ {
-* Large file support is disabled on HP-UX. See the comments in
-src/s/hpux10.h.
+** PSGML
-* Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
-libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
+*** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
+`before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
+longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
-Beginning with version 21.3, Emacs refuses to link against libungif
-whose version is 4.1.0 or older (the `configure' script behaves as if
-libungif were not available at all).
+*** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
-* Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
+PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
+as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
+of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
+sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
+HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
+(from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
+(for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
-By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
-`{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
-any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
-vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
-parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
-in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
-pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
-introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
-through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
-to the end of a very large buffer.
+*** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
+(alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
+Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
+earlier versions.
-Beginning with version 21.3, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
-is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
-to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
-indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
+--- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
++++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
+@@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
+ (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
+ (cond
+ ((stringp entity) ; a file name
+- (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
++ (insert-file-contents entity)
+ (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
+ ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
+ (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
-If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
-makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
-fontification by setting the variable
-`font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
-be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
+** AUCTeX
-Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
-in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
+You should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoid
+it.
-* When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
-or messed up.
+*** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.
-For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
-empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
-background.
+Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solve
+these problems.
-This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
-definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
-solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
-option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style.
+*** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.
-Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
-applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
-(should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
-so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
-Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
-present or commented out:
+Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
+byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
- Emacs.default.attributeForeground
- Emacs.default.attributeBackground
- Emacs*Foreground
- Emacs*Background
+** PCL-CVS
-* Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
+*** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit.
-Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
-MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
-port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
-keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
-of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
+When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examined
+directory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous message
+from which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committed
+files. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer are
+not updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines are
+added to the top-level directory.
-* Dired is very slow.
+This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS
+1.12.10 or newer to fix this problem.
-This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
-time. Possible reasons for this include:
+** Miscellaneous problems
- - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
- response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
+*** Self-documentation messages are garbled.
- - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
+This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
+with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
+corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
- - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
+*** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
+terminal type.
-To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
-`directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
-invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
-(c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
+The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
+environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
+provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
+emulates.
-* Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
+Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
+in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
+it only if it is undefined.
-If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
-due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
-and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
-port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
-are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
-confuses ange-ftp.
+ if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
-The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
-(version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
-Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
-directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
-variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
-client's executable. For example:
+Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
+happen in a non-login shell.
- (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
+*** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
-If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
-this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
+This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
+smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
+on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
+problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
- (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
+ if ($?EMACS) then
+ if ($EMACS == "t") then
+ unset edit
+ stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
+ endif
+ endif
-* Some versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
-properly with Emacs 21. These problems are fixed in W3 version
-4.0pre.47.
+*** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
-* On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
-are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
-so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
-Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
+This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
+full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
+/etc/hosts file, something like this:
-* Compiling on AIX 4.3.x or 4.4 fails.
+127.0.0.1 localhost
+129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
-This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
-the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
-redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
-is to use the default compiler `cc'.
+The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
-* Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
-`before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
-longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
+*** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
-* PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
+If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
+representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
+ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
+version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
+systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
+ftp client. On a Debian system, type
-PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
-as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
-of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
-sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
-HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
-(from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
-(for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
+ update-alternatives --config ftp
-* The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
+and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
-It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
-Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
-please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
-argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
+*** JPEG images aren't displayed.
-* Unicode characters are not unified with other Mule charsets.
-
-As of v21.1, Emacs charsets are still not unified. This means that
-characters which belong to charsets such as Latin-2, Greek, Hebrew,
-etc. and the same characters in the `mule-unicode-*' charsets are
-different characters, as far as Emacs is concerned. For example, text
-which includes Unicode characters from the Latin-2 locale cannot be
-encoded by Emacs with ISO 8859-2 coding system; and if you yank Greek
-text from a buffer whose buffer-file-coding-system is greek-iso-8bit
-into a mule-unicode-0100-24ff buffer, Emacs won't be able to save that
-buffer neither as ISO 8859-7 nor as UTF-8.
-
-To work around this, install some add-on package such as Mule-UCS.
-
-* Problems when using Emacs with UTF-8 locales
-
-Some systems, including recent versions of GNU/Linux, have terminals
-or X11 subsystems that can be configured to provide Unicode/UTF-8
-input and display. Normally, such a system sets environment variables
-such as LANG, LC_CTYPE, or LC_ALL to a string which ends with a
-`.UTF-8'. For example, a system like this in a French locale might
-use `fr_FR.UTF-8' as the value of LANG.
-
-Since Unicode support in Emacs, as of v21.1, is not yet complete (see
-the previous entry in this file), UTF-8 support is not enabled by
-default, even in UTF-8 locales. Thus, some Emacs features, such as
-non-ASCII keyboard input, might appear to be broken in these locales.
-To solve these problems, you need to turn on some options in your
-`.emacs' file. Specifically, the following customizations should make
-Emacs work correctly with UTF-8 input and text:
-
- (setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
- (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
- (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
- (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
- (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)
-
-* The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
+This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
+Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
+correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
+against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
-This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
-slots now. If the built-in Unicode/UTF-8 support is insufficient,
-e.g. if you need more CJK coverage, use the current Mule-UCS package.
-Any files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode won't be read
-correctly by Emacs 21.
+*** Dired is very slow.
-* Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
+This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
+time. Possible reasons for this include:
-The error message might be something like this:
+ - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
+ response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
- "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
+ - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
-This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
-built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
-for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
-corrects that.
+ - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
+
+To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
+`directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
+invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
+(c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
+
+*** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
+under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
+
+*** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
+
+It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
+Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
+please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
+argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
-* ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
+*** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
-* On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
+*** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
-* On Solaris 2.7, building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
-C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
-compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
-release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
-another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
-and the default CFLAGS.
+*** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
+video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
-* Compiling syntax.c with the OPENSTEP 4.2 compiler gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
+This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
+your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
+check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
-The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
-following message:
+*** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
- cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
+This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
+characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
+characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
+support for 8-bit characters.
-To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
-INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
-functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
+To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
+this at your shell's prompt:
- static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
- {
- return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
- }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
+ ispell -vv
-Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
-with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
+and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
+"!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
+does not.
-* Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
+To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
+in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
+Then rebuild the speller.
-A typical error message might be something like
+Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
+version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
- No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
+Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
+in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
+Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
+it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
+spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
-This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
-Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
-are:
+If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
+you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
+can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
+in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
- - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
+* Runtime problems related to font handling
- - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
- /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
- /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
+** Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
-One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
-fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
-the problematic line(s) and correct them.
+Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
+supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
+many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
-* Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
+If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
+server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
+You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
-The typical error message might be like this:
+The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
+display all the characters Emacs supports.
- "Cannot open load file: fontset"
+Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
+missing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur for
+character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
+but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
+of this character to display a space.
-This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
-tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
-files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
-Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
-when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
-required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
-its loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
+** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
-Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
-file could fail to load if it is compressed.
+You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
-The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
-file.
+** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
-Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
-lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
-print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
+This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
+than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
+lines do not overlap.
- emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
+** Loading fonts is very slow.
-If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
-and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
-load-path.
+You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
+Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
+directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
+"fonts.scale".
-* Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
+If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
+font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
-An example of such an error is:
+With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
+directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
+Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
- x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
+** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
-This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your classpath.
-The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
-present in load-path:
+By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
+`{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
+any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
+vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
+parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
+in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
+pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
+introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
+through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
+to the end of a very large buffer.
- emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
+Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
+is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
+to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
+indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
-If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
-and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
-load-path.
+If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
+makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
+fontification by setting the variable
+`font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
+be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
-* Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
+Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
+in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
-If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
-representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
-ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
-version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
-systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
-ftp client. On a Debian system, type
+** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
+character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
- update-alternatives --config ftp
+One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
+away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
+XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
-and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
+** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
-* Emacs built on Windows 9x/ME crashes at startup on Windows XP,
-or Emacs built on XP crashes at startup on Windows 9x/ME.
+This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
+For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
+with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
+the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
+fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
+Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
+and then start the application again.
+If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
+application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
+of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
+sufficient to recompile Qt.
-There appear to be general problems running programs compiled on
-Windows 9x/ME on Windows XP and vice-versa, at least when compilation
-is done with MSVC 6.0. This affects other programs as well as Emacs.
-The compatibility options in the program properties on Windows XP may
-help in some cases.
+** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.
-* Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
+This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
+2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
+event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
+Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
-The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
-work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
-was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
-work when an antivirus package is installed.
+A workaround for this is to add something like
-The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
-mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
-or disable it entirely.
+emacs.waitForWM: false
-* On Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
+to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
+frame's parameter list, like this:
-This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
-when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
-cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
-http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
+ (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
-* Windows 95/98/ME crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
+(this should go into your `.emacs' file).
-When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
-Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
-particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
-program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
-PATH.
+** Underlines appear at the wrong position.
-* Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
-mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
-exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
-seen.
+This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
+Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
+neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
+problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
+`.emacs'.
-* After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working.
+To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
+type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
+property.
-This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
-Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
-modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
-keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
-modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
-was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
-Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
+** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
-The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
-modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
-and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
-which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
-the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
-modifier:
+When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
+(either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
+then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
+correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
+gives the appearance of "double spacing".
- xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
+To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
+feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
-A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
-is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
+* Internationalization problems
- xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
+** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
-This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
-keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
-keys can serve as Meta.
+XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
+minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
+name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
+according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
+characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
+able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
+C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
+font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
+include in the fontset spec:
-The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
-keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
+mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
+mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
+mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
-* On OSF/Dec Unix/Tru64/<whatever it is this year> under X locally or
-remotely, M-SPC acts as a `compose' key with strange results. See
-keyboard(5).
+** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
-Changing Alt_L to Meta_L fixes it:
-% xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L'
-% xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R'
+Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in the
+ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts of
+CJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets:
-* Error "conflicting types for `initstate'" compiling with GCC on Irix 6.
+ GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601
-Install GCC 2.95 or a newer version, and this problem should go away.
-It is possible that this problem results from upgrading the operating
-system without reinstalling GCC; so you could also try reinstalling
-the same version of GCC, and telling us whether that fixes the problem.
+The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on by
+default). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacs
+charset is decided by the current language environment. For instance,
+in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312.
-* Emacs dumps core on Solaris in function IMCheckWindow.
+If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
+characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
+(composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
+correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
+If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
+substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
+information.
-This was reported to happen when Emacs runs with more than one frame,
-and one of them is closed, either with "C-x 5 0" or from the window
-manager.
+** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
+
+Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
+library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
+following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
+though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
+distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
+
+--- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
++++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
+@@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
+
+ (mapcar
+ (lambda (x)
+- (mapcar
+- (lambda (y)
+- (mucs-define-coding-system
+- (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
+- (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
+- (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
+- (cdr x)))
++ (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
++ ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
++ ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
++ ;; system definitions.
++ (let ((y (cadr x)))
++ (mucs-define-coding-system
++ (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
++ (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
++ (mapcar
++ (lambda (y)
++ (mucs-define-coding-system
++ (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
++ (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
++ (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
++ (cdr x)))
+ `((utf-8
+ (utf-8-unix
+ ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
+
+Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
+Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
+
+** Mule-UCS compilation problem.
+
+Emacs of old versions and XEmacs byte-compile the form `(progn progn
+...)' the same way as `(progn ...)', but Emacs of version 21.3 and the
+later process that form just as interpreter does, that is, as `progn'
+variable reference. Apply the following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 to
+make it compiled by the latest Emacs.
+
+--- mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 00:42:23 -0000 1.1.1.1
++++ mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 01:31:51 -0000 1.3
+@@ -639,10 +639,14 @@
+ (mucs-notify-embedment 'mucs-ccl-required name)
+ (setq ccl-pgm-list (cdr ccl-pgm-list)))
+ ; (message "MCCLREGFIN:%S" result)
+- `(progn
+- (setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
+- (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
+- ,@result)))
++ ;; The only way the function is used in this package is included
++ ;; in `mucs-package-definition-end-hook' value, where it must
++ ;; return (possibly empty) *list* of forms. Do this. Do not rely
++ ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)'
++ ;; form.
++ `((setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist
++ (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))
++ ,@result)))
+
+ ;;; Add hook for embedding translation informations to a package.
+ (add-hook 'mucs-package-definition-end-hook
+
+** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
-This bug was reported to Sun as
+Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
+other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
+that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
+size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
+when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
+fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
- Gtk apps dump core in ximlocal.so.2:IMCheckIMWindow()
- Bug Reports: 4463537
+To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
-Installing Solaris 8 patch 108773-12 for Sparc and 108774-12 for x86
-reportedly fixes the bug, which appears to be inside the shared
-library xiiimp.so.
+ xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
-Alternatively, you can configure Emacs with `--with-xim=no' to prevent
-the core dump, but will loose X input method support, of course. (You
-can use Emacs's own input methods instead, if you install Leim.)
+If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
+problem.
-* On Solaris 7, Emacs gets a segmentation fault when starting up using X.
+The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
+`fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
+`xset fp rehash'.
-This results from Sun patch 107058-01 (SunOS 5.7: Patch for
-assembler) if you use GCC version 2.7 or later.
-To work around it, either install patch 106950-03 or later,
-or uninstall patch 107058-01, or install the GNU Binutils.
-Then recompile Emacs, and it should work.
+** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
-* With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
+This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
+slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
+flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
+support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
+generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
-Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
+** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
- --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
- +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
- @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
- -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
- +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
- /******************************************************************
+The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
+ (standard-display-european t)
+That should be changed to
+ (standard-display-european 1 t)
- Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
- @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@
- _XimMakeImName(lcd)
- XLCd lcd;
- {
- - char* begin;
- - char* end;
- + char* begin = NULL;
- + char* end = NULL;
- char* ret;
- int i = 0;
- char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
- @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
- }
- ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
- if (ret != NULL) {
- - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
- + if (begin != NULL) {
- + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
- + } else {
- + ret[0] = '\0';
- + }
- ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
- }
- return ret;
+* X runtime problems
+** X keyboard problems
-* Emacs crashes on Irix 6.5 on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
-
-This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
+*** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
+
+This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
+Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
+character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
+to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
-* Emacs crashes in utmpname on Irix 5.3.
+For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
-This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
-It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
+ xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
+
+If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
+Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
+xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
+
+*** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
+
+Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
+
+*** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux.
+
+Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' program
+which is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs users
+from using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'.
+
+One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' file
+which can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory.
+However, that requires root access.
+
+Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources.
-* The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
+Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.
+
+*** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
+
+See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
+for character composition.
+
+*** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
-* On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
-the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
-
-You can fix this by editing the file:
+*** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
- /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
-
-Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
+These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
+particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
+configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
+configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
+change this.
- Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
+*** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
-that should read:
+This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
+a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
+--without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
- Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
+*** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
+directly with an X server.
-Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
+If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
+does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
+whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
+followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
+it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
+have made the key binding correctly.
-* Emacs on Digital Unix 4.0 fails to build, giving error message
- Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
+If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
+be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
+server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
+default.
-This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
-Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
+If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
-* Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
+ xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
+ xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
-Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
-problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
-documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
+If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
+commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
+are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
+modifier bit not otherwise used.
-* Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
+If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
+keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
+some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
+commands show above to make them modifier keys.
-These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
-particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
-configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
-configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
-change this.
+Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
+into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
-* When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
+** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems
-When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
-(either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
-then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
-correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
-gives the appearance of "double spacing".
+*** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
-To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
-feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
+A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
+into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
+incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
+other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
+been filed.
-* Failure in unexec while dumping emacs on Digital Unix 4.0
+*** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
+or messed up.
-This problem manifests itself as an error message
+For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
+empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
+background.
- unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
+This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
+definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
+solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
+option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
+is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
-The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
-were built for an older system version,
+Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
+applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
+(should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
+so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
+Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
+present or commented out:
- ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
+ Emacs.default.attributeForeground
+ Emacs.default.attributeBackground
+ Emacs*Foreground
+ Emacs*Background
-made the problem go away.
+*** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
-* No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
+This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
+requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
+of klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections,
+which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
+while, Emacs may print a message:
-This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
-as of 8 Dec 1998.
+ Timed out waiting for property-notify event
-The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
+A workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' that
+comes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.
-* As of version 20.4, Emacs doesn't work properly if configured for
-the Motif toolkit and linked against the free LessTif library. The
-next Emacs release is expected to work with LessTif.
+*** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
-* Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
+This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
+seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
+To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
+and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
-This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
-a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
-likely to cause it.
+*** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
+click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
+is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
+problem disappears.
-We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
+*** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
+XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
+one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
+For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
+"C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
+used with neXtaw at run time.
-* Emacs makes HPUX 11.0 crash.
+The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
+want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
+built Emacs with.
-This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
+*** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
-* Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine (HPUX 10.20).
+When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
+graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
+and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
+file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
-This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
+The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
+for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
-* The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
-Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
-`add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
-'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
+Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
+but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
+the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
-* Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
-(alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
-Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
-earlier versions.
+*** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
---- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
-+++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
-@@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
- (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
- (cond
- ((stringp entity) ; a file name
-- (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
-+ (insert-file-contents entity)
- (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
- ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
- (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
+The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
+emulation for which it is set up.
-* Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUC TeX installed.
+Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
+Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
+On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
+--enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
+successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
+lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
+menu placement.
-Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUC TeX; upgrading should solve
-these problems.
+On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
+locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
+what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
+developers.
-* No colors in AUC TeX with Emacs 21.
+*** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
-Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
-byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
+This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
-* Running TeX from AUC TeX package with Emacs 20.3 gives a Lisp error
-about a read-only tex output buffer.
+ Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
-This problem appeared for AUC TeX version 9.9j and some earlier
-versions. Here is a patch for the file tex-buf.el in the AUC TeX
-package.
+That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
+do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
+explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
+the resource prevents the problem.
-diff -c auctex/tex-buf.el~ auctex/tex-buf.el
-*** auctex/tex-buf.el~ Wed Jul 29 18:35:32 1998
---- auctex/tex-buf.el Sat Sep 5 15:20:38 1998
-***************
-*** 545,551 ****
- (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
- (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
- (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
-! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer)
- (set-buffer buffer)
- (if dir (cd dir))
- (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
-- --- 545,552 ----
- (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
- (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
- (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
-! (let (temp-buffer-show-function temp-buffer-show-hook)
-! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer))
- (set-buffer buffer)
- (if dir (cd dir))
- (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
-
-* On Irix 6.3, substituting environment variables in file names
-in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
+** General X problems
- Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
+*** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
-This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
-003082 August 11, 1998.
+We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
+scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
+happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
+on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
-* After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
+Here's how to do this:
-The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
- (standard-display-european t)
-That should be changed to
- (standard-display-european 1 t)
+ (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
-* Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
+If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
+try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
+to normal, do
-You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
-supplies the `install-info' command.
+ (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
-* Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key, on HPUX.
+*** Error messages about undefined colors on X.
-To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
-rights, containing this text:
+The messages might say something like this:
---------------------------------
-xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
-keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
-keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
-EOF
+ Unable to load color "grey95"
-xmodmap - << EOF
-clear mod1
-keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
-add mod1 = Meta_L
-keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
-add mod2 = Mode_switch
-EOF
---------------------------------
+(typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
-* Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
+ Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
-This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
-requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
-of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
-which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
-while, Emacs will print a message:
+These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
+many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
+resources to load all the colors it needs.
- Timed out waiting for property-notify event
+A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
-A workaround is to not use `klipper'.
+"undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in the
+X configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not where
+X expects to find it.
-* Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
-in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
-drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
+*** Improving performance with slow X connections.
-This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
-device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
-work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
+There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
+be carried out at the same time:
-* M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
+1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
+ language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
+ the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
+ the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
+ package.
-See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
-for character composition.
+2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
+ switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
-* Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
+3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
+ forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
-This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
-full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
-/etc/hosts file, something like this:
+4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
+ to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
+ improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
+ of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
+ several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
+ instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate
+ packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
+ -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
+ Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
+ For more about lbxproxy, see:
+ http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
-127.0.0.1 localhost
-129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
+*** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
-The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
+This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
+a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
+likely to cause it.
-* Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs on Digital Unix 4.0.
+We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
-So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
-is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
-properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
-`tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
-in Emacs.
+*** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
-* When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
+There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
+that replacing the mouse made it stop.
-This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
-characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
-characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
-support for 8-bit characters.
+*** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
-To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
-this at your shell's prompt:
+On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
+works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
+bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
+the Files menu).
- ispell -vv
+This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
+due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
+knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
+workaround can be found.
-and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
-"!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
-does not.
+*** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
+parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
-To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
-in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
-Then rebuild the speller.
+This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
+ emacs*Cursor: black
+(which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
+that isn't a color.)
-Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
-version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
+The fix is to correct your X resources.
-Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
-in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
-Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
-it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
-spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
+*** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
-* On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
-5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
+If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
+resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
+renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
+font.
-This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
-One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
-known to work.
+One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
+your font path, like this:
-* On Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
-CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
-
-This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
+ xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
-Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
-events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
-distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
-combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
-AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
-to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
+*** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
-* Under some Windows X-servers, Emacs' display is incorrect
+An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
-The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
-screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
-display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
-to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
+ Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
-This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
-as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
-problem lies in the X-server settings.
+This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
+individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
+want, rewrite the resource.
-There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
-running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
-un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
-selection".
+To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
+-query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
+the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
-Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
-please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
-If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
-here.
+*** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
+*** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
-* On Solaris 2, Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
+One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
+your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
+the environment.
-The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
-Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
-(Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
-You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
-You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
-look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
-are currently recommended for your host.
+*** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
-On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
-105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
-105284-18 might fix it again.
+The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
+arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
+tell Emacs to compensate for this.
-* On Solaris 2.6 and 7, the Compose key does not work.
+I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
+whether this problem is present on a given system.
-This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
-the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
-support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
-If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
+*** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
-One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
-For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
-variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
-lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
-should do.
+People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
+not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
+the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
+the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
-pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
-if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
-libraries.
+You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
+However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
+you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
-* Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
+The easy way to do this is to put
-This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
-seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
-To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
-and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
+ (setq x-sigio-bug t)
-* Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
+in your site-init.el file.
-You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
-either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
-calls for specifying this.
+* Runtime problems on character termunals
-If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
-mail-host-address to the value you want.
+** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
-* Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs, on UnixWare 2.1
+This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
+used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
+away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
+streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
+user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
+properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
+input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
+easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
-Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
-virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
-the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
-error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
-exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
-memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
+There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
-You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
-But you have to be root to do it.
+ 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
+ 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
+ 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
-According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
+First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
+they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
+"no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
+escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
+and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
+control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
- # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
- # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
- # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
- # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
- # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
+Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
+needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
+by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
+rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
+your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
+it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
+the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
+problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
+to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
-(He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
-These changes take effect when you reboot.
+For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
+giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
+codes. You might as well try it.
-* Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
+If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
+through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
+computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
+much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
+control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
+you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
+replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
+measures can make Emacs semi-work.
-We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
-scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
-happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
-on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
+You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
+handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
+enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
+now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
+enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
+control handling.)
-Here's how to do this:
+If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
+is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
+other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
+and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
+other control characters are already used by emacs.
- (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
+IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
+Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
+order to continue.
-If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
-try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
-to normal, do
+If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
+certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
+`enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
+automatically. Here is an example:
- (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
+(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
-* Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
+If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
+and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
+manually.
-Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
-supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
-many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
+I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
+assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
+control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
+merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
+widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
+use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
+will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
+of inferior systems.
-If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
-server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
-You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
+** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
-The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
-display all the characters Emacs supports.
+For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
+control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
+terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
+that wants to use flow control.
-Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
-missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
-character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
-but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
-of this character to display a space.
+You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
+If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
+flow control, as described in the preceding section.
-* Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
+If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
+into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
+shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
-You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
+** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
-* Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
+This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
+terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
+the combination of features specified for that terminal.
-This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
-than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
-lines do not overlap.
+The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
+Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
+(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
+terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
+what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
+and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
+There are several possibilities:
-* You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
-video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
+1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
-This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
-your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
-check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
+In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
+need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
-* In FreeBSD 2.1.5, useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
-directories that have the +t bit.
+2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
+ of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
+ by termcap.
-This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
-Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
-with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
-link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
+This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
+Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
+and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
+classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
+Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
+tested on many kinds of terminals.
-If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
-file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
+3) The termcap entry is wrong.
-* When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
-commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
+See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
+that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
+for certain terminals.
-You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
+4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
+ right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
- dbxenv output_short_file_name off
+This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
+in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
-* Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
-appear on disk.
+** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
-This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
-remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
-implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
-detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
-calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
-where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
+Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
+control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
+On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
+control on the local system.
-* "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
+One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
+(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
+stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
+"stty start u stop u" will do this.
-If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
-will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
-in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
-did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
-character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
-must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
+Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
+around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
+issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
-You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
-them to two different keys.
+If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
+M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
+if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
+following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
-* Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup, on AIX4.2.
+(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
-If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
-without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
+See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
+info.
-* movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
+** Output from Control-V is slow.
-Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
-NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
-entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
-listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
-the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
-old POP protocol.
+On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
+Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
+to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
+before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
+the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
+it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
-* Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
+If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
+that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
+specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
+concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
+send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
+fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
+time as the operations really take.
-This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
-use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
-an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
-happens to exist on your X server).
+Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
+at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
+terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
+operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
+flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
+an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
+Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
+cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
+not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
+is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
-* Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
+Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
+multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
+termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
+fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
+each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
+to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
+`cm' string.
-This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
-prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
-to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
+You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
+has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
+take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
-Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
-(src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
+A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
+of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
-* Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on HPUX 9 after you delete a frame.
+** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
-We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
-the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
-does not happen.
+Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
+after a day or two.
-* Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
+The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
+the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
+character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
+of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
+overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
+to it.
-We suspect that this is a similar bug in the X libraries provided by
-Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
-makes the problem stop:
+For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
+and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
+other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
+but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
+that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
+important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
-105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
-105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
-106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
-105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
+If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
+you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
+ (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
+You can probably access help-command via f1.
-Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
-suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
+** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
-106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
-106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
-105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
+Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
+emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
+entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
+"Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
+supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
+Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
+uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
+"colors".
-* Problems running Perl under Emacs on Windows NT/95.
+In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
+``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
+back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
+use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
+doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
+sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
+it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
+capability).
-`perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
-The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
+Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
+attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
+incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
+this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
-The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
-"CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
-with the user.
+Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
+of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
+entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
+`xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
+emulator.
-On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
-pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
-communicate with the subprocess.
+Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-line
+option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
+modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
+for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
-On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
-relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
-redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
-stdin.
+Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
+Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
+Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
+recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
+global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
+`global-font-lock-mode'.
-A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
+* Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants
-For Perl 4:
+** GNU/Linux
- *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
- --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
- ***************
- *** 68,74 ****
- $rcfile=".perldb";
- }
- else {
- ! $console = "con";
- $rcfile="perldb.ini";
- }
+*** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted.
- --- 68,74 ----
- $rcfile=".perldb";
- }
- else {
- ! $console = "";
- $rcfile="perldb.ini";
- }
+There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs to
+read corrupted process output.
+*** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption.
- For Perl 5:
- *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
- --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
- ***************
- *** 22,28 ****
- $rcfile=".perldb";
- }
- elsif (-e "con") {
- ! $console = "con";
- $rcfile="perldb.ini";
- }
- else {
- --- 22,28 ----
- $rcfile=".perldb";
- }
- elsif (-e "con") {
- ! $console = "";
- $rcfile="perldb.ini";
- }
- else {
+If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupted
+due to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc.
-* Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs:
+To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make it
+executable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name of
+the script:
-There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
+#!/bin/bash
+exec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)
+exec ssh "$@"
- * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
- `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
- * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
+*** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
+5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
-To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
-subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
-them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
-incorrect library functions.
+This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
+One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
+known to work.
-* When compiling with DJGPP on Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
+*** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,
+the Meta key stops working.
-If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
-Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
-program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
-config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
-the front of your PATH environment variable.
+This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
+Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
+modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
+keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
+modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
+was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
+Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
-* When compiling with DJGPP on Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
-like make-docfile.
+The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
+modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
+and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
+which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
+the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
+modifier:
-This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
-variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
-compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
-the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
+ xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
-* Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
-run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
+A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
+is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
-Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
-immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
-the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
-and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
+ xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
-Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
-the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
-Lisp.
+This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
+keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
+keys can serve as Meta.
-This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
-support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
-characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
-You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
-filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
-compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
-explains this issue in more detail.
+The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
+keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
-Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
-MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
-by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
-unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
-them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
-must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
-properly truncated.
+*** GNU/Linux: low startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
-* Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
+People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
+startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
- "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
+This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
+Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
+improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
+networked and non-networked machines.
-This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
-on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
-value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
-works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
-support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
-undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
-[emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
-`TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
-your system works as before.
+Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
-* On Windows 95, Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
+**** Networked Case.
-This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
-You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
+First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
+exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
+(replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
-* Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on Windows.
+ 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
-This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
-you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
-and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
-more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
-or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
+Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
+lines:
-* `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
+ order hosts, bind
+ multi on
-This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
-version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
-definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
-incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
-does not work with this version of ncurses.
+Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
+indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
+database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
+dynamically allocate ip addresses).
-The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
+**** Non-Networked Case.
-* Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
+The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
+However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
+simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
+`touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
+file is not necessary with this approach.
-Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
-editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
-as GCC.
+*** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
-* Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly truncated
-on GNU/Linux systems.
+This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
+ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
+These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
+the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
+(show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
+blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
+cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
+always blinks.
-This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
-1.3.75.
+A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
+enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
+the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
+cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
+the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
+cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
+
+To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
+`linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
+the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
+produce a modified terminfo entry.
+
+Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
+change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
-* Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
+*** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
Using the old library version is a workaround.
-* On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
+** Mac OS X
-This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
-version of Solaris that you are using.
+*** Mac OS X (Carbon): Environment Variables from dotfiles are ignored.
-* Emacs dumps core on startup, on Solaris.
+When starting Emacs from the Dock or the Finder on Mac OS X, the
+environment variables that are set up in dotfiles, such as .cshrc or
+.profile, are ignored. This is because the Finder and Dock are not
+started from a shell, but instead from the Window Manager itself.
-Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
-102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
-Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
-by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
-However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
+The workaround for this is to create a .MacOSX/environment.plist file to
+setup these environment variables. These environment variables will
+apply to all processes regardless of where they are started.
+For me information, see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html.
-Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
-you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
-We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
-for certain.
+*** Mac OS X (Carbon): Process output truncated when using ptys.
- 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
- 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
- 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
+There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
+Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
+leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
-(One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
-with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
+*** Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Carbon): QuickTime 7.0.4 updater breaks build.
-If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
-bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
+On the above environment, build fails at the link stage with the
+message like "Undefined symbols: _HICopyAccessibilityActionDescription
+referenced from QuickTime expected to be defined in Carbon". A
+workaround is to use QuickTime 7.0.1 reinstaller.
-Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
-Solaris 2.5.
+** FreeBSD
-* Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called, on Solaris.
+*** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
+directories that have the +t bit.
-If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
-of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
-called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
+This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
+Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
+with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
+link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
-* "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes on HPUX, in
-Emacs built with Motif.
+If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
+file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
-This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
-such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
+*** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.
-* On Irix 6.0, make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi
+By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
+FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
+current keymap to a file with the command
-A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
-in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
-find that string, and take out the spaces.
+ $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
-Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
+Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
+definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
+key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
+to look like this
-* "out of virtual swap space" on Irix 5.3
+ 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
-This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
-many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
-swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
-can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
-command `swap -l'.
+to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
-You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
-line like this:
+ $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
-/usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
+** HP-UX
-where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
-by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
-that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
-new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
-information.
+*** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
-The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
-swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
-on the network that can log on to the host.
+christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
-If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
-the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
-some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
-icons.
+The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
+execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
+tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
+but tty is giving it back 3.
-You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
-FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
-("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
-ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
+The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
+word:
-* With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
-character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
+if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
-One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
-away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
-XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
+should be changed to:
-* On SunOS 4.1.3, Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
+if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
-This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
-on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
-version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
-it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
+Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
+and into .login.
-* On SunOS 4, Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
-(or log out, if you logged in using X).
+*** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.
-Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
+On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
+file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
+does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
+value is just ten seconds.
-* On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
-with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
+If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
-On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
-`unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
-Definitions" to make them defined.
+*** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
+other non-English HP keyboards too).
-* On SunOS, you get linker errors
- ld: Undefined symbol
- _get_wmShellWidgetClass
- _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
+This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
+shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
+configures the X server.
-The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
-or link libXmu statically.
+ xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
+ keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
+ keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
+ EOF
-* On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as
- ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
- of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
+ xmodmap - << EOF
+ clear mod1
+ keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
+ add mod1 = Meta_L
+ keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
+ add mod2 = Mode_switch
+ EOF
-This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
-these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
-you build Emacs:
+*** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes in
+Emacs built with Motif.
- cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
- chmod 664 libIM.a
- ranlib libIM.a
+This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
+such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
-Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
-Makefile).
+*** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.
-* Unpredictable segmentation faults on Solaris 2.3 and 2.4.
+To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
+rights, containing this text:
-A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
-the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
+--------------------------------
+xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
+keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
+keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
+EOF
-We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
+xmodmap - << EOF
+clear mod1
+keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
+add mod1 = Meta_L
+keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
+add mod2 = Mode_switch
+EOF
+--------------------------------
-* Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for
-Windows.
+*** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.
-A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
-Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
-problem.
+This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
-* Emacs crashes at startup on MSDOS.
+** AIX
-Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
-and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
-know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
-memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
-However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
+*** AIX: Trouble using ptys.
-You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
-arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
-information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
-is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
+People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
+Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
-Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
-configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
-removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
-and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
-the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
+*** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.
-* A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
+The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
-twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
-You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
+ *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
+ aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
- UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
+This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
-* Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
+*** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
+are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
+so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
+Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
-This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
-the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
-Emacs's configure script.
+*** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.
-* Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
+This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
+the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
+redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
+is to use the default compiler `cc'.
-This results from a bug in GNU Sed version 2.03. To solve the
-problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
-configure script.
+*** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
+with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
-* On Sunos 4.1.1, there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
+On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
+`unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
+Definitions" to make them defined.
-If you get errors such as
+** Solaris
- "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
- "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
- "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
+We list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in the
+section on legacy systems.
-This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
-to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
-script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
-make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
-ones available when you build Emacs.
+*** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
-* The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
-other non-English HP keyboards too).
+This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
+C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
-This is because HPUX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
-shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
-configures the X server.
+*** Problem with remote X server on Suns.
- xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
- keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
- keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
- EOF
+On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
+may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
+is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
+As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
- xmodmap - << EOF
- clear mod1
- keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
- add mod1 = Meta_L
- keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
- add mod2 = Mode_switch
- EOF
+*** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
-* The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
+We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided by
+Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
+makes the problem stop:
-Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
-command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
-Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
-manager to use some other command. You can disable the
-shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
+105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
+105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
+106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
+105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
- OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
+Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
+suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
-* Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
+106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
+106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
+105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
-There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
-that replacing the mouse made it stop.
+*** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)
-* Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys.
+This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
+Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
-The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
-be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
-to allocate ptys reliably.
+*** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
+commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
-* On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
+You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
-The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
-Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
-compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
-workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
-syms.h.
+ dbxenv output_short_file_name off
-* Slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
+*** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
+the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
-People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
-startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
+You can fix this by editing the file:
-This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
-Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
-improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
-networked and non-networked machines.
+ /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
-Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
+Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
-** Networked Case
+ Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
-First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
-exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
-(replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
+that should read:
- 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAME
+ Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
-Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
-lines:
+Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
- order hosts, bind
- multi on
+** Irix
-Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
-indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
-database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
-dynamically allocate ip addresses).
+*** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
-** Non-Networked Case
+This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
-The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
-However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
-simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
-`touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
-file is not necessary with this approach.
+*** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.
-* On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
-forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
+The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
+be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
+to allocate ptys reliably.
-casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
-after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
+* Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows
- #if ThreadedX
- #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
- #endif
+** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.
-to:
+A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
+Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
+problem.
- #if OSMinorVersion < 4
- #if ThreadedX
- #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
- #endif
- #endif
+** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 22.1
-Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
-(as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
-OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
-Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
-definition for your type of machine and system.
+Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameter
+with a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems.
+Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control over
+which font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character,
+use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset.
-Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
-the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
-Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
+Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
+is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
+displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
+synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
+waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
+pop-up menu interaction.
-For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
-101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
-to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
-patch.
+Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
+for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
-However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
-he changed
- #define ThreadedX YES
-to
- #define ThreadedX NO
-in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
-`-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
-typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
+There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
+mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
+frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
+after moving back into it.
-* With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
- to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
+Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
+not as severely as in 21.1.
-This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
-with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
-another escape character in kermit. One user did
+An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
+Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
- set escape-character 17
+Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. Some
+of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
+in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
+characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
+work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
+you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
+the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
+ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
+appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
+yet.)
-in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
+The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
+month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
+of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
+library function.
-* The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
+** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
-This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
+This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
+you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
+and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
+more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
+or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
- Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
+** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
-That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
-do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
-explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
-the resource prevents the problem.
+Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
+MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
+port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
+keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
+of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
-* Emacs gets hung shortly after startup, on Sunos 4.1.3.
+** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
-We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
-one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
+If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
+due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
+and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
+port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
+are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
+confuses ange-ftp.
-100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
-100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
-100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
-100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
-100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
+The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
+(version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
+Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
+directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
+variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
+client's executable. For example:
-We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
-which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
+ (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
-* Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
+If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
+this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
-This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
-installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
-specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
-corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
-the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
-Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
-files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
-original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
-not to work.
+ (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
-The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
-when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
-is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
-same directory where system header files are kept.
+** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
-* On Solaris 2.x, GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported"
+This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
+likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
-This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
-are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
-does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
-later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
-described in the Solaris FAQ
-<http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
-to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
+Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
+print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
+printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
+built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
+has):
-* The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
+(setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
+(setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
+(setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
+(setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
-This shell command should fix it:
+** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
- xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
+The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
+work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
+was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
+work when an antivirus package is installed.
-* Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
+The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
+mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
+or disable it entirely.
-On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
-with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
-version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
-C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
-GCC.
+** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
-* On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
+This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
+programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
+mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
+different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
+middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
+"scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
+generic mouse driver might help.
-This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
-for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
-/usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
+** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
-* You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
+This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
+generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
+movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
+scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
-On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
-works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
-bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
-the Files menu).
+** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
+mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
+exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
+seen.
-This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
-due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
-knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
-workaround can be found.
+** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
+CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
-* Unusable default font on SCO 3.2v4.
+This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
-The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
-that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
-fonts, so it does not work.
-
-This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
-the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
-emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
-that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
-resources affect Emacs also:
+Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
+events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
+distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
+combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
+AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
+to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
- *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
- *Background: scoBackground
- *Foreground: scoForeground
+** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.
-The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
-Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
+The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
+screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
+display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
+to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
- Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
- Emacs*Background: white
- Emacs*Foreground: black
+This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
+as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
+problem lies in the X-server settings.
-(These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
-suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
-starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
-environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
-as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
-/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
-but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
-Open Desktop display.
+There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
+running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
+un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
+selection".
-These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
-machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
+Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
+please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
+If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
+here.
-* rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
+* Build-time problems
-This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
-The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
+** Configuration
-* Emacs is slow using X11R5 on HP/UX.
+*** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
-This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
-doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
-because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
-libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
-those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
-install them and rebuild Emacs.
+There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
+by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
+default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
-* Loading fonts is very slow.
+If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
+`--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
+shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
+the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
+Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
+explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
-You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
-Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
-directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
-"fonts.scale".
+** Compilation
-If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
-font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
+*** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
-With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
-directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
-Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
+This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
+(RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
+(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
+configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
+files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
+left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
+itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
+Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
-* On AIX 3.2.4, releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
+In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
+machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
+(it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
+This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
-Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
-ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
-lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
-treated as control characters.
+If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
+(Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
+you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
+force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
+problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
+blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
+`mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
+options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
+`/etc/auto.home'.
-You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
-releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
+Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
+a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
+waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
+to work around the problem.
-* display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
+Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
+onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
+you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
+`/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
-Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
-versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
-cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
-This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
-processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
-
-Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
-the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
+ marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
-The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
+The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
-* On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
+*** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
-This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
-C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
+This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
+of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
+version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
+dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
+around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
+incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
+". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
+directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
+variables).
-* Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
- segmentation fault and core dump.
+The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
+`-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
+when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
+unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
+run the script like this:
-This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
-added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
+ CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
- x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
+(replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
+the script).
-If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
-untar it :-).
+Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
+Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
-* Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
+*** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
+*** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
-To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
+This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
+had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve the
+problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
+configure script.
- /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
+*** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
-and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
+This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
+the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
+Emacs's configure script.
-The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
-cannot easily arrange to supply them.
+*** Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
-* Link failure on IBM AIX 1.3 ptf 0013.
+Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
+version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
+necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
+__MSVCRT__, like so:
-There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
-the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
-workaround/fix is:
+ configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
- cd /lib
- ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
- ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
+*** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.
-* Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose on a Sun.
+Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seem
+to detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if that
+fails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.
-If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
-with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
-the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
-libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
-toolkit.)
+*** Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
-If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
-lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
-X11R4, then use it in the link.
+The error message might be something like this:
-* Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'
+ Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
+ Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
+ NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
+ '0xffffffff'
+ Stop.
-This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
-Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
-Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
-where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
+This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
+which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
+`*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
+endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
+or EOL conversions.
-So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
+The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
+change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
+in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
+which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
+mangling them.
-* In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
+*** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
-This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
-smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
-on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
-problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
+This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
+defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
+patch to assert.h should solve this:
- if ($?EMACS) then
- if ($EMACS == "t") then
- unset edit
- stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
- endif
- endif
+*** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
+--- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
+***************
+*** 41,47 ****
+ /*
+ * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
+ */
+! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
-* An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
-parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
+ #else /* debugging enabled */
-This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
- emacs*Cursor: black
-(which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
-that isn't a color.)
+--- 41,47 ----
+ /*
+ * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
+ */
+! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
-The fix is to correct your X resources.
+ #else /* debugging enabled */
-* Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1 using --with-x-toolkit.
-If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
-_iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
--lXaw in the command that links temacs.
+** Linking
-This problem seems to arise only when the international language
-extensions to X11R5 are installed.
+*** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
+undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
-* Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
+This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
+with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
+GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
+from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
+compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
+link stage.
-This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
-to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
-Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
+A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
-* src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
+ make CC=gcc
-This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
-had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.
+Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
+with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
-* Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
+*** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.
-If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
-resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
-renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
-font.
+There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
+the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
+workaround/fix is:
-One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
-your font path, like this:
+ cd /lib
+ ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
+ ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
- xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
+*** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as
+ ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
+ of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
-* Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
+This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
+these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
+you build Emacs:
-An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
+ cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
+ chmod 664 libIM.a
+ ranlib libIM.a
- Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
-
-This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
-individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
-want, rewrite the resource.
+Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
+Makefile).
-To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
--query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
-the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
+*** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
-* --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
+To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
-On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
-unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
-toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
-libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
-unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
-and Solaris in version 19.29.
+ /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
-* `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
+and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
-This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
-commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
-Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
-hand.
+The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
+cannot easily arrange to supply them.
-* --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong on BSD/386.
+*** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
-This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
-The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
-such as bash.
+Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
-* Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies, on Sunos 5.3.
+*** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
-A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
-exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
-applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
-communicating through pipes.
+This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
+version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
+definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
+incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
+does not work with this version of ncurses.
-* Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
+The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
-Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
-sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
-delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
-program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
-means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
-command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
-obtain the destination address.
+** Dumping
-There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
-In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
-non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
-2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
-4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
-have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
-of this writing, these official versions are available:
+*** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
- Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
- sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
- sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
- sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
- sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
+With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Redhat Fedora Core
+1 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
+creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs tries
+to handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, these
+instructions can be useful.
+The work-around explained here is not enough on Fedora Core 4 (and possible
+newer). Read the next item.
- IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
- sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
+Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture is
+x86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures no
+workaround is known.
-* On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs:
+You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
- Could not load program emacs
- Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
- Error was: Exec format error
+ cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
-or this one:
+It returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
+read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
+associated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command:
- Could not load program .emacs
- Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
- Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
- Error was: Exec format error
+ echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
-These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
-compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
+When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
+execution of this command:
-* On AIX, you get this compiler error message:
+ ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
- Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
- 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
+To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
+Exec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'
+command when running temacs like this:
-This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
-libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
-X11Dev... with smit.
+ setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
-* You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
+
+*** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.
-This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
-Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
-character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
-to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
+In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during
+`make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel"
+item, Linux kernel shipped with Fedora Core 4 randomizes the virtual
+address space of a process. As the result dumping may fail even if
+you turn off exec-shield. In this case, use the -R option to the setarch
+command:
-For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
+ setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
- xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
+or
-If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
-Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
-xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
+ setarch i386 -R make bootstrap
-* C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
+*** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.
-You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
-though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
-or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
+This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
+Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
-* Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
+It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
+space available on the machine.
-These control the actions of Emacs.
-~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
-EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
-"load" will search.
+On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in the
+subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
+for large blocks (many pages).
-If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
-of them, then try again.
+*** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.
+*** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".
+*** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
+*** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.
-* After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
+This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
+fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
+binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
-Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
-mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
-the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
+In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
+It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
+a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
+itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
+when unpacking the shell archive.
-Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
-you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
-operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
-configure script) that reads:
-#define SYSTEM_MALLOC
-This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
-the kernel bug.
+I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
+what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
+file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
-* Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
-directly with an X server.
+If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
+nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
-If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
-does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
-whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
-followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
-it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
-have made the key binding correctly.
+ 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
+ 2) Delete all the .elc files.
+ 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
+ (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
+ 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
+ 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
+ to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
+ You may need to increase the value of the variable
+ max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
+ on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
+ 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
+ and remake temacs.
+ 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
-If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
-be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
-server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
-default.
+*** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".
-If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
+This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
+files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
+space than was allocated.
- xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
- xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
+This could be caused by
+ 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
+ 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
+ 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
+ Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
+ if you have received Emacs from some other site
+ and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
+ deleting that file.
+ 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
+ (not from the directory you expected).
+ 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
+ This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
+ loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
+ 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
+ the space required.
-If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
-commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
-are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
-modifier bit not otherwise used.
+If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
+of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
-If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
-keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
-some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
-commands show above to make them modifier keys.
+But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
+of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
+problem.
-Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
-into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
+*** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
-* `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'
+The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
+C backtrace printed by GDB:
-On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
-file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
-does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
-value is just ten seconds.
+ 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
+ (gdb) where
+ #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
+ #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
+ #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
+ #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
-If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
+This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
+of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
+but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
+other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
+distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
+GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
+following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
+distribution:
-* `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
+ #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
+ even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
+ know what's really going on here. */
+ /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
+ 0x10000000. */
+ #if defined __linux__
+ #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
+ #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
+ #endif
+ #endif
+ #endif /* 0 */
-On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
-in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
-expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
-in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
+Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
+the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
+should now succeed.
-The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
-anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
+** Installation
-I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
-going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
-Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
-in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
+*** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
-* On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
+You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
+supplies the `install-info' command.
-Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
-the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
-sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
+** First execution
-* Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
+*** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
-Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
+This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
+via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
+Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
+binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
-* Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
-the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
-* Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
-* GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
+ emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
-This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
-libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
-shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
-similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
+We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
+build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
-The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
-the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
+*** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
-The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
-installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
+Two causes have been seen for such problems.
-On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
+1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
+as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
+it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
+value in the man page for a.out (5).
-If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
-then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
-do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
-or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
-that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
-be careful not to lose the others.
+2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
+initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
+of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
+not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
+may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
-Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
+* Emacs 19 problems
-#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
+** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.
-Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
-the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
-again to say this:
+This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
+Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
+Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
+where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
-#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
+So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
-* On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
+* Runtime problems on legacy systems
- /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
+This section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.
+If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,
+it is unlikely you will see any of these.
-The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
+** Ancient operating systems
-The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
+AIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.
-* Self documentation messages are garbled.
+*** AIX: You get this compiler error message:
-This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
-with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
-corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
+ Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
+ 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
-* Trouble using ptys on AIX.
+This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
+libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
+X11Dev... with smit.
-People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
-Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
+(This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)
-* Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
+*** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
-christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
+Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
+ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
+lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
+treated as control characters.
-The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
-execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
-tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
-but tty is giving it back 3.
+You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
+releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
-The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
-word:
+*** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs:
-if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
+ Could not load program emacs
+ Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
+ Error was: Exec format error
-should be changed to:
+or this one:
-if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
+ Could not load program .emacs
+ Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
+ Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
+ Error was: Exec format error
-Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
-and into .login.
+These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
+compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
-* Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
+*** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.
-Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
+If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
+without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
-* Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
-* `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
+*** ISC Unix
-One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
-your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
-the environment.
+**** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
-* Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
+Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
+versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
+cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
+This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
+processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
-If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
-`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
-that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
-with a floating point option other than the default.
+Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
+the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
-It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
-crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
-However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
-floating point option: -fsoft.
+The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
-* Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
+*** SunOS
-The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
-arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
-tell Emacs to compensate for this.
+SunOS 4.1.4 stopped shipping on Sep 30 1998.
-I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
-whether this problem is present on a given system.
+**** SunOS: You get linker errors
+ ld: Undefined symbol
+ _get_wmShellWidgetClass
+ _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
-* Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
- as a concentrator.
+**** Sun 4.0.x: M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
-This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
-7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
+This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
+version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
-* M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
+**** SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3: Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
-This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
-version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
+Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
+sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
+delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
+program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
+means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
+command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
+obtain the destination address.
-* Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
- terminal type.
+There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
+In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
+non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
+2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
+4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
+have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
+of this writing, these official versions are available:
-The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
-environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
-provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
-emulates.
+ Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
+ sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
+ sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
+ sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
+ sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
-Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
-in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
-it only if it is undefined.
+ IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
+ sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
- if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
+**** Sunos 4: You get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
-Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
-happen in a non-login shell.
+This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
+for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
+/usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
-* X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
+**** SunOS 4.1.3: Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
-People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
-not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
-the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
-the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
+This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
+on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
+version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
+it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
-You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
-However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
-you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
+**** Sunos 4.1.3: Emacs gets hung shortly after startup.
-The easy way to do this is to put
+We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
+one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
- (setq x-sigio-bug t)
+100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
+100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
+100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
+100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
+100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
-in your site-init.el file.
+We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
+which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
-* Problem with remote X server on Suns.
+**** SunOS 4: Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
+(or log out, if you logged in using X).
-On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
-may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
-is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
-As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
+Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
+
+The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
+or link libXmu statically.
+
+**** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.
+
+A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
+exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
+applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
+communicating through pipes.
-* Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
+*** Apollo Domain
+
+**** Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain.
You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
% /etc/crpty 8
# creates eight new pty's
-* Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
+*** Irix
-This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
-Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
+*** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
-It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
-space available on the machine.
+This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
+as of 8 Dec 1998.
-On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
-subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
-for large blocks (many pages).
+The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
-* test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
-* or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
-* or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
-* or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs
+*** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file names
+in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
-This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
-fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
-binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
+ Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
-In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
-It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
-a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
-itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
-when unpacking the shell archive.
+This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
+003082 August 11, 1998.
-I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
-what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
-file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
+*** OPENSTEP
-If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
-nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
+**** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
- 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
- 2) Delete all the .elc files.
- 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
- (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
- 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
- 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
- to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
- You may need to increase the value of the variable
- max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
- on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
- 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
- and remake temacs.
- 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
+The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
+following message:
-* temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
+ cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
-This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
-files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
-space than was allocated.
+To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
+INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
+functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
-This could be caused by
- 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
- 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
- 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
- Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
- if you have received Emacs from some other site
- and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
- deleting that file.
- 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
- (not from the directory you expected).
- 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
- This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
- loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
- 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
- the space required.
+ static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
+ {
+ return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
+ }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
-If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
-of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
+Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
+with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
-But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
-of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
-problem.
+*** Solaris 2.x
-* Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
+**** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
-You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
-Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
-will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
-and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
+Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
+editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
+as GCC.
-Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
-than the corresponding .el file.
+**** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.
-* The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
+If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
+of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
+called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
-Two causes have been seen for such problems.
+**** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
-1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
-as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
-it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
-value in the man page for a.out (5).
+This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
+version of Solaris that you are using.
-2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
-initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
-of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
-not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
-may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
+**** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.
-* Compilation errors on VMS.
+A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
+the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
-You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
-variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
-This is not an error. Ignore it.
+We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
+
+**** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.
+
+Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
+102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
+Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
+by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
+However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
+
+Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
+you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
+We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
+for certain.
+
+ 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
+ 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
+ 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
+
+(One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
+with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
+
+If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
+bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
+
+Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
+Solaris 2.5.
+
+**** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
+forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
+
+casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
+after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
+
+ #if ThreadedX
+ #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
+ #endif
+
+to:
+
+ #if OSMinorVersion < 4
+ #if ThreadedX
+ #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
+ #endif
+ #endif
+
+Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
+(as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
+OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
+Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
+definition for your type of machine and system.
+
+Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
+the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
+Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
+
+For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
+101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
+to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
+patch.
+
+However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
+he changed
+ #define ThreadedX YES
+to
+ #define ThreadedX NO
+in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
+`-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
+typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
+
+**** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".
+
+This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
+are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
+does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
+later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
+described in the Solaris FAQ
+<http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
+to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
+
+**** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
+C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
+compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
+release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
+another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
+and the default CFLAGS.
+
+**** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
+
+The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
+Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
+(Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
+You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
+You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
+look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
+are currently recommended for your host.
+
+On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
+105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
+105284-18 might fix it again.
+
+**** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.
+
+This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
+the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
+support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
+If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
+
+One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
+For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
+variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
+lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
+should do.
+
+pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
+if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
+libraries.
+
+*** HP/UX versions before 11.0
+
+HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.
+HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.
+
+**** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.
+
+We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
+the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
+does not happen.
+
+*** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.
+
+See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.
+
+*** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.
+
+This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
+doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
+because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
+libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
+those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
+install them and rebuild Emacs.
+
+*** Ultrix and Digital Unix
+
+**** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
+
+This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
+commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
+Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
+hand.
+
+**** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.
+
+So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
+is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
+properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
+`tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
+in Emacs.
+
+**** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
+
+On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
+in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
+expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
+in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
+
+The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
+anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
+
+I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
+going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
+Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
+in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
+
+*** SVr4
+
+**** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
+
+Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
+the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
+sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
+
+**** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
+
+Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
+mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
+the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
+
+Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
+you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
+operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
+configure script) that reads:
+#define SYSTEM_MALLOC
+This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
+the kernel bug.
+
+*** Irix 5 and earlier
+
+Exactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0
+shipped in 1994, it has been some years.
+
+**** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
+
+The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
+Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
+compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
+workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
+syms.h.
+
+**** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".
+
+This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
+many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
+swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
+can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
+command `swap -l'.
+
+You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
+line like this:
+
+/usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
+
+where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
+by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
+that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
+new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
+information.
+
+The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
+swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
+on the network that can log on to the host.
+
+If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
+the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
+some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
+icons.
+
+You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
+FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
+("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
+ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
+
+**** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.
+
+This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
+It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
+
+**** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.
+
+A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
+in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
+find that string, and take out the spaces.
+
+Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
+
+*** SCO Unix and UnixWare
+
+**** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.
+
+The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
+that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
+fonts, so it does not work.
+
+This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
+the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
+emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
+that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
+resources affect Emacs also:
+
+ *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
+ *Background: scoBackground
+ *Foreground: scoForeground
+
+The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
+Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
+
+ Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
+ Emacs*Background: white
+ Emacs*Foreground: black
+
+(These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
+suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
+starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
+environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
+as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
+/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
+but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
+Open Desktop display.
+
+These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
+machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
+
+**** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
+
+On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
+with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
+version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
+C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
+GCC.
+
+**** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.
+
+Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
+virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
+the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
+error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
+exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
+memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
+
+You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
+But you have to be root to do it.
+
+According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
-VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
-were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
+ # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
+ # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
+ # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
+ # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
+ # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
-There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
-in conditional expressions. The bug is:
- char c = -1, d = 1;
- int i;
+(He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
+These changes take effect when you reboot.
- i = d ? c : d;
-The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
-conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
-constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
+*** Linux 1.x
-* rmail gets error getting new mail
+**** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
-rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
-called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
-the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
+This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
+to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
+Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
-There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
-the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
-`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
-this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
-the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
-IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
-SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
+**** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly
+truncated on GNU/Linux systems.
-If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
-prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
-you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
-`mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
+This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
+1.3.75.
- chgrp mail movemail
- chmod 2755 movemail
+** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME
-If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
-prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
-you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
-`mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
-make install.
+*** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs
- chgrp mail movemail
- chmod 2755 movemail
+`perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
+The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
-Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
-installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
-installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
-/usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
-mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
-directory copy is ineffective.
+The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
+"CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
+with the user.
-* Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
+On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
+pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
+communicate with the subprocess.
-This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
-used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
-away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
-streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
-user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
-properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
-input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
-easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
+On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
+relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
+redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
+stdin.
-There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
+A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
- 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
- 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
- 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
+For Perl 4:
-First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
-they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
-"no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
-escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
-and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
-control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
+ *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
+ --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
+ ***************
+ *** 68,74 ****
+ $rcfile=".perldb";
+ }
+ else {
+ ! $console = "con";
+ $rcfile="perldb.ini";
+ }
-Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
-needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
-by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
-rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
-your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
-it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
-the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
-problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
-to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
+ --- 68,74 ----
+ $rcfile=".perldb";
+ }
+ else {
+ ! $console = "";
+ $rcfile="perldb.ini";
+ }
-For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
-giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
-codes. You might as well try it.
-If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
-through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
-computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
-much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
-control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
-you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
-replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
-measures can make Emacs semi-work.
+ For Perl 5:
+ *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
+ --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
+ ***************
+ *** 22,28 ****
+ $rcfile=".perldb";
+ }
+ elsif (-e "con") {
+ ! $console = "con";
+ $rcfile="perldb.ini";
+ }
+ else {
+ --- 22,28 ----
+ $rcfile=".perldb";
+ }
+ elsif (-e "con") {
+ ! $console = "";
+ $rcfile="perldb.ini";
+ }
+ else {
-You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
-handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
-enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
-now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
-enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
-control handling.)
+*** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
-If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
-is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
-other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
-and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
-other control characters are already used by emacs.
+This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
+You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
+
+*** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.
+
+This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
+when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
+cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
+http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
+
+*** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
+
+When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
+Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
+particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
+program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
+PATH.
+
+** MS-DOS
+
+*** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
+
+If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
+Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
+program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
+config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
+the front of your PATH environment variable.
+
+*** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
+like make-docfile.
+
+This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
+variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
+compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
+the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
+
+*** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
+
+ "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
+
+This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
+on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
+value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
+works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
+support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
+undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
+[emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
+`TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
+your system works as before.
+
+*** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.
+
+Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
+and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
+know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
+memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
+However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
+
+You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
+arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
+information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
+is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
+
+Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
+configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
+removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
+and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
+the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
+
+*** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
+in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
+drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
+
+This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
+device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
+work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
+
+*** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.
+
+There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
+
+ * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
+ `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
+ * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
+
+To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
+subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
+them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
+incorrect library functions.
+
+*** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
+run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
+
+Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
+immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
+the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
+and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
+
+Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
+the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
+Lisp.
+
+This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
+support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
+characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
+You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
+filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
+compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
+explains this issue in more detail.
+
+Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
+MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
+by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
+unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
+them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
+must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
+properly truncated.
-IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
-Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
-order to continue.
+** Archaic window managers and toolkits
-If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
-certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
-`enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
-automatically. Here is an example:
+*** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
-(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
+Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
+command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
+Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
+manager to use some other command. You can disable the
+shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
-If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
-and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
-manually.
+ OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
-I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
-assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
-control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
-merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
-widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
-use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
-will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
-of inferior systems.
+**** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
-* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
+twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
+You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
-For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
-control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
-terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
-that wants to use flow control.
+ UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
-You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
-If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
-flow control, as described in the preceding section.
+** Bugs related to old DEC hardware
-If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
-into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
-shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
+*** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
-* Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
+This shell command should fix it:
-Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
-control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
-On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
-control on the local system.
+ xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
-One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
-(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
-stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
-"stty start u stop u" will do this.
+*** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
+as a concentrator.
-Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
-around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
-issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
+This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
+7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
-If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
-M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
-if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
-following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
+* Build problems on legacy systems
-(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
+** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.
-See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
-info.
+This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
+The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
+such as bash.
-* Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
+** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message
+ Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
-This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
-terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
-the combination of features specified for that terminal.
+This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
+Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
-The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
-Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
-(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
-terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
-what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
-and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
-There are several possibilities:
+** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.
-1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
+This problem manifests itself as an error message
-In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
-need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
+ unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
-2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
- of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
- by termcap.
+The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
+were built for an older system version,
-This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
-Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
-and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
-classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
-Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
-tested on many kinds of terminals.
+ ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
-3) The termcap entry is wrong.
+made the problem go away.
-See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
-that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
-for certain terminals.
+** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
-4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
- right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
+If you get errors such as
-This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
-in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
+ "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
+ "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
+ "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
-* Output from Control-V is slow.
+This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
+to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
+script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
+make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
+ones available when you build Emacs.
-On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
-Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
-to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
-before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
-the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
-it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
+** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld:
-If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
-that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
-specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
-concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
-send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
-fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
-time as the operations really take.
+ /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
-Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
-at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
-terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
-operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
-flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
-an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
-Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
-cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
-not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
-is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
+The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
-Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
-multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
-termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
-fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
-each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
-to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
-`cm' string.
+The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
-You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
-has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
-take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
+** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.
-A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
-of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
+If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
+_iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
+-lXaw in the command that links temacs.
-* Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
+This problem seems to arise only when the international language
+extensions to X11R5 are installed.
-The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
+** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
- *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
- aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
+If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
+`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
+that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
+with a floating point option other than the default.
-This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
+It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
+crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
+However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
+floating point option: -fsoft.
-* You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
+** SunOS: Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose.
-Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
-after a day or two.
+If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
+with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
+the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
+libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
+toolkit.)
-The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
-the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
-character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
-of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
-overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
-to it.
+If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
+lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
+X11R4, then use it in the link.
-For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
-and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
-other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
-but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
-that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
-important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
+** SunOS4, DGUX 5.4.2: --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
-If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
-you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
- (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
-You can probably access help-command via f1.
+On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
+unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
+toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
+libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
+unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
+and Solaris in version 19.29.
-* Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
-It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
-but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
-causes it.
+** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.
- There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
- call in the RFS server.
+This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
- The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
- close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
- many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
- to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
+** VMS: Compilation errors on VMS.
- This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
+You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
+variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
+This is not an error. Ignore it.
- The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
- non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
- gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
- a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
- as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
- is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
- protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
+VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
+were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
- (as always, your line numbers may vary)
+There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
+in conditional expressions. The bug is:
+ char c = -1, d = 1;
+ int i;
- % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
- RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
- retrieving revision 1.2
- diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
- *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
- --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
- ***************
- *** 163,169 ****
- /*
- * No return sent for close or fsync!
- */
- ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
- proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
- else
- {
- --- 166,172 ----
- /*
- * No return sent for close or fsync!
- */
- ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
- proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
- else
- {
+ i = d ? c : d;
+The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
+conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
+constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
-* Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
+** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
-* 68000 C compiler problems
+** 68000 C compiler problems
Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
These are some that have been observed.
-** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
+*** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
if x is of type Lisp_Object.
-** "cannot reclaim" error.
+*** "cannot reclaim" error.
This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
simpler expressions.
-** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
+*** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
-* C compilers lose on returning unions
+*** C compilers lose on returning unions.
I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
\f
+Copyright 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999,
+ 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+
+Copying and redistribution of this file with or without modification
+are permitted without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
+
Local variables:
mode: outline
paragraph-separate: "[ \f]*$"
end:
+
+arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a