1 This file describes various problems that have been encountered
2 in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.
4 * Segfault on GNU/Linux using certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.
6 With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Redhat Fedora Core
7 1), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, which
8 creates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper.
10 You can check the Exec-shield state like this:
12 cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shield
14 It returns 1 or 2 when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Please
15 read your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield and
18 When Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during the
19 execution of this command:
21 temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]
23 To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disable
24 Exec-shield while building Emacs, using the `setarch' command like
27 setarch i386 ./configure <configure parameters>
28 setarch i386 make <make parameters>
30 * Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.
32 This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.
33 For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comes
34 with a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then use
35 the newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarily
36 fixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can be
37 Emacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,
38 and then start the application again.
39 If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, the
40 application with problem must be recompiled with the same version
41 of FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it is
42 sufficient to recompile Qt.
44 * Process output truncated on Mac OS X (Carbon) when using pty's.
46 There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on the
47 Mac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,
48 leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.
50 * Emacs crashes on Mac OS X (Carbon) after system software upgrade.
52 This problem seems to be now solved by Steven Tamm's patch to
53 unexmacosx.c on Nov 24, 2002.
55 Between Mac OS X release 10.2.1 and 10.2.2 there was an incompatible
56 change in the memory allocator that causes a EXC_BAD_ACCESS error near
57 xrealloc(). Relinking the application (by deleting src/temacs and
58 running make) will solve the problem. It appears to be caused by some
59 problems with the unexec code and its interaction with libSystem.B.
61 * Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.
63 XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which have
64 minimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the font
65 name is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoire
66 according to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to display
67 characters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't be
68 able to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-u
69 C-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets the
70 font for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,
71 include in the fontset spec:
73 mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
74 mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\
75 mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1
77 * The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.
79 Emacs by default only supports the parts of the Unicode BMP whose code
80 points are in the ranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff. This excludes: most
81 of CJK, Yi and Hangul, as well as everything outside the BMP.
83 If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, the
84 characters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8
85 (composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written back
86 correctly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.
87 If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they are
88 substituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you lose
91 To edit such UTF data, turn on Utf-Translate-Cjk mode, which makes
92 many common CJK characters available for encoding and decoding and can
93 be extended by updating the tables it uses. This also allows you to
94 save as UTF buffers containing characters decoded by the chinese-,
95 japanese- and korean- coding systems, e.g. cut and pasted from
98 * Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.
100 When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that the
101 graphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"
102 and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging the
103 file dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.
105 The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacement
106 for Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.
108 Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,
109 but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file in
110 the minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.
112 * Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X) running on Solaris 7 or 8.
114 This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.
115 Rebuild it on Solaris 8.
117 * Mule-UCS loads very slowly.
119 Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
120 library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply the
121 following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,
122 though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Some
123 distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)
125 --- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30
126 +++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
127 @@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
133 - (mucs-define-coding-system
134 - (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
135 - (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
136 - (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
138 + (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
139 + ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
140 + ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
141 + ;; system definitions.
142 + (let ((y (cadr x)))
143 + (mucs-define-coding-system
144 + (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
145 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
148 + (mucs-define-coding-system
149 + (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
150 + (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
151 + (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
155 ?u "UTF-8 coding system"
157 Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
158 Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.
160 * Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.
162 This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
163 of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released
164 version of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around those
165 dates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1
166 around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions is
167 incompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into
168 ". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parent
169 directory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Make
172 The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the
173 `-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automatically
174 when it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit some
175 unknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',
176 run the script like this:
178 CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...
180 (replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass to
183 Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port of
184 Emacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.
186 * Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of an
187 undefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.
189 This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were built
190 with GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other than
191 GCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functions
192 from libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the system
193 compiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during the
196 A solution is to link with GCC, like this:
200 Since the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacs
201 with GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.
203 * Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.
205 Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin
206 version 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to be
207 necessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define
210 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
212 * Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.
214 The error message might be something like this:
216 Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package...
217 Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary
218 NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code
222 This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a program
223 which converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The
224 `*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style line
225 endings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any code
228 The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does not
229 change the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site has
230 in the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'
231 which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives without
234 * Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.
236 The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typical
237 C backtrace printed by GDB:
239 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
241 #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol ()
242 #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray ()
243 #2 0x18b3500 in main ()
244 #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,
246 This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the base
247 of the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,
248 but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaks
249 other versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way to
250 distinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties of
251 GNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment the
252 following section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacs
255 #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog,
256 even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we
257 know what's really going on here. */
258 /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to
260 #if defined __linux__
261 #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95)
262 #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000
267 Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, save
268 the file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping process
271 * JPEG images aren't displayed.
273 This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
274 Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for the
275 correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
276 against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.
278 * Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.
280 This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
281 defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The following
282 patch to assert.h should solve this:
284 *** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999
285 --- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001
289 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
291 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0);
293 #else /* debugging enabled */
297 * If not debugging, assert does nothing.
299 ! #define assert(x) ((void)0)
301 #else /* debugging enabled */
305 * Improving performance with slow X connections
307 There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which can
308 be carried out at the same time:
310 1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some
311 language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using
312 the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect
313 the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim
316 2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider
317 switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.
319 3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this
320 forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).
322 4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface
323 to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which
324 improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness
325 of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping
326 several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together,
327 instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate
328 packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are:
329 -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents
330 Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems.
331 For more about lbxproxy, see:
332 http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html
334 * Getting a Meta key on the FreeBSD console
336 By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key on
337 FreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump the
338 current keymap to a file with the command
340 $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbd
342 Edit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key the
343 definition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''
344 key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbd
347 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta O
349 to make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with
351 $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd
353 * Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.
355 A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequence
356 into the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparent
357 incompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affects
358 other programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report has
361 * Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font
363 This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE
364 2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotify
365 event from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.
366 Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.
368 A workaround for this is to add something like
370 emacs.waitForWM: false
372 to your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to a
373 frame's parameter list, like this:
375 (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))
377 (this should go into your `.emacs' file).
379 * Underlines appear at the wrong position.
381 This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.
382 Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmk
383 neep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent this
384 problem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your
387 To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,
388 type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITION
391 * When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouse
392 click in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. This
393 is probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, the
396 * There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,
397 XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile with
398 one of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.
399 For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type
400 "C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw was
401 used with neXtaw at run time.
403 The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actually
404 want to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version you
407 * Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.
409 This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't know
410 a good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured
411 --without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.
413 * Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.
415 This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but the
416 terminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.
417 If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if your
418 version of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncurses
419 and reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.
421 All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not the
422 problem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it uses
425 * Error messages about undefined colors on X.
427 The messages might say something like this:
429 Unable to load color "grey95"
431 (typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this:
433 Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)
435 These problems could happen if some other X program has used up too
436 many colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient system
437 resources to load all the colors it needs.
439 A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs.
441 * Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.
443 Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminal
444 emulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap database
445 entry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the
446 "Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors are
447 supported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support within
448 Emacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your system
449 uses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is
452 In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for
453 ``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminal
454 back to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will not
455 use colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entry
456 doesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escape
457 sequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and make
458 it use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"
461 Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs which
462 attributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capability
463 incorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try setting
464 this capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.
466 Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the value
467 of the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminal
468 entry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to
469 `xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatible
472 Beginning with version 21.4, Emacs supports the --color command-line
473 option which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popular
474 modes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets up
475 for using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.
477 Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.
478 Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn on
479 Font-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. The
480 recommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-x
481 global-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable
482 `global-font-lock-mode'.
484 * Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.
486 This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which use
487 ncurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.
488 These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, where
489 the "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"
490 (show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on a
491 blinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full character
492 cell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursor
495 A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that it
496 enables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by inverting
497 the colors of the character at point, so what you see is a block
498 cursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefine
499 the "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the software
500 cursor instead of the hardware cursor.
502 To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file
503 `linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities send
504 the sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" to
505 produce a modified terminfo entry.
507 Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,
508 change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.
510 * Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.
512 The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motif
513 emulation for which it is set up.
515 Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.
516 Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.
517 On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure
518 --enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the most
519 successful. The binary GNU/Linux package
520 lesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems with
523 On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionally
524 locks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't know
525 what causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacs
528 * Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 21.2.
530 Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menu
531 is displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is not
532 displayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows is
533 synchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages while
534 waiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog or
535 pop-up menu interaction.
537 Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help text
538 for menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.
540 There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and the
541 mouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the first
542 frame. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frame
543 after moving back into it.
545 Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, although
546 not as severely as in 21.1.
548 Emacs can sometimes abort when non-ASCII text, possibly with null
549 characters, is copied and pasted into a buffer.
551 An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the Windows
552 Manager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.
554 Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs (as of v21.2). Some
555 of these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encoded
556 in the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1
557 characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make this
558 work, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value after
559 you activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activate
560 the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacs
561 ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
562 appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
565 Windows uses UTF-16 encoding to deal with multilingual text (text not
566 encodable in the `system codepage') in the clipboard. To deal with
567 this, load the library `utf-16' and use `set-selection-coding-system'
568 to set the clipboard coding system to `utf-16-le-with-signature-dos'.
570 The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
571 month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
572 of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
575 * The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.
577 There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linker
578 by default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution by
579 default only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.
581 If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the
582 `--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces a
583 shared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerun
584 the Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.
585 Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a file
586 explicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.
588 * Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.
590 This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system
591 (RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris
592 (SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to that
593 configuration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit the
594 files' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file is
595 left ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumping
596 itself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumped
597 Emacs executable to fail with the above message.
599 In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and the
600 machine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make
601 (it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).
602 This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.
604 If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05
605 (Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or if
606 you have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you can
607 force the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix the
608 problem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KB
609 blocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the
610 `mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mount
611 options in the appropriate system configuration file, such as
614 Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait for
615 a few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,
616 waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemed
617 to work around the problem.
619 Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directory
620 onto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' and
621 you are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the
622 `/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble:
624 marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...
626 The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.
628 * Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.
630 This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mounted
631 via NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.
632 Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full of
633 binary null characters, and the `file' utility says:
635 emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminators
637 We don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is to
638 build Emacs in a directory on a local disk.
640 * Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.
642 Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists with
643 other sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through software
644 that is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another font
645 size, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fonts
646 when they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-clean
647 fonts have this bug in some versions of X.
649 To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this:
651 xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1
653 If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of the
656 The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate
657 `fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run
660 * Large file support is disabled on HP-UX. See the comments in
663 * Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
664 libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
665 Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
666 if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
669 * Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.
671 By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
672 `{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of
673 any comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but the
674 vast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have such
675 parens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizations
676 in Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid some
677 pathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontification
678 introduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrolling
679 through the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumping
680 to the end of a very large buffer.
682 Beginning with version 21.4, a parenthesis or a brace in column zero
683 is highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,
684 to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also with
685 indentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.
687 If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine which
688 makes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrect
689 fontification by setting the variable
690 `font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This must
691 be done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)
693 Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,
694 in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.
696 * When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,
699 For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in the
700 empty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some other
703 This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and font
704 definitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. The
705 solution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"
706 option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this option
707 is in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".
709 Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to other
710 applications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'
711 (should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)
712 so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only for
713 Emacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either not
714 present or commented out:
716 Emacs.default.attributeForeground
717 Emacs.default.attributeBackground
721 * Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.
723 Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from the
724 MS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bash
725 port or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore the
726 keyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin ports
727 of Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)
729 * Dired is very slow.
731 This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a long
732 time. Possible reasons for this include:
734 - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df'
735 response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds);
737 - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix;
739 - slow operation of some versions of `df'.
741 To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable
742 `directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs from
743 invoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or
744 (c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.
746 * Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
748 If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to be
749 due to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between it
750 and the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windows
751 port of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responses
752 are not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, which
755 The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL
756 (version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stock
757 Windows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'
758 directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set the
759 variable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of the
760 client's executable. For example:
762 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")
764 If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
765 this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:
767 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")
769 * Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
770 under Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.
772 * On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
773 are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. If
774 so, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configure
775 Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.
777 * Compiling on AIX 4.3.x or 4.4 fails.
779 This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead of
780 the default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benign
781 redefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solution
782 is to use the default compiler `cc'.
784 * Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables
785 `before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are no
786 longer used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.
788 * PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.
790 PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)
791 as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacement
792 of that package. The conflict will be shown if you load
793 sgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you edit
794 HTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode
795 (from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el
796 (for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.
798 * The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.
800 It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
801 Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,
802 please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, remove
803 argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.
805 * The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.
807 This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
808 slots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually more
809 flexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJK
810 support.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren't
811 generally read correctly by Emacs 21.
813 * Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.
815 The error message might be something like this:
817 "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"
819 This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is a
820 built-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patch
821 for epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3
824 * ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.
826 This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: it
827 defines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking it
828 runs in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.
830 The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.
832 * lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.
834 This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution is
835 likely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.
837 Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do not
838 print plain text anymore, they will only print through graphical
839 printer drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basic
840 built in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose it
843 (setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default
844 (setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad
845 (setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed
846 (setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer
848 * On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errors
849 from the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find some
850 shared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.
851 These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose shared
852 library is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.
854 Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the build
855 process invokes Emacs several times.
857 On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in your
858 environment to specify additional directories where shared libraries
861 Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but before
862 Emacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include a
863 specified run-time search path in the executable.
865 On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamic
866 linking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported with
867 backtraces like this:
870 0 strcmp(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) ["/xlv22/ficus-jan23/work/irix/lib/libc/libc_n32_M3_ns/strings/strcmp.s":35, 0xfb7e480]
871 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
872 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98]
873 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
874 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4]
875 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2)
876 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44]
877 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0)
878 ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c]
880 (`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why this
881 happens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (which
882 forces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seems
883 to work around the problem.
885 Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.
887 * On Solaris 2.7, building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15
888 C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due to
889 compiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 C
890 release was reported to work without problems. It worked OK on
891 another system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compiler
892 and the default CFLAGS.
894 * Compiling syntax.c with the OPENSTEP 4.2 compiler gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.
896 The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with the
899 cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11
901 To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,
902 INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3
903 functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example:
905 static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from)
907 return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from));
908 }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/
910 Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.c
911 with a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.
913 * Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.
915 A typical error message might be something like
917 No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'
919 This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family for
920 Emacs to use. The possible places where this specification might be
923 - in your ~/.Xdefaults file
925 - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or
926 /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or
927 /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs
929 One of these files might have bad or malformed specification of a
930 fontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to find
931 the problematic line(s) and correct them.
933 * Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.
935 The typical error message might be like this:
937 "Cannot open load file: fontset"
939 This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That file
940 tells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lisp
941 files. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since the
942 Auto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,
943 when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' is
944 required to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, and
945 it's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)
947 Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elc
948 file could fail to load if it is compressed.
950 The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elc
953 Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc files
954 lurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command will
955 print any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path:
957 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
959 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
960 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
963 * Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.
965 An example of such an error is:
967 x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
969 This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your classpath.
970 The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that are
971 present in load-path:
973 emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadows
975 If this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,
976 and should be deleted or their directories removed from your
979 * Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.
981 If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is not
982 representable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as the
983 ftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernel
984 version 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on other
985 systems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standard
986 ftp client. On a Debian system, type
988 update-alternatives --config ftp
990 and then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.
992 * Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.
994 The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don't
995 work or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"
996 was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don't
997 work when an antivirus package is installed.
999 The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressive
1000 mode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstall
1001 or disable it entirely.
1003 * On MS-Windows 95/98/ME, subprocesses do not terminate properly.
1005 This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problems
1006 when shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exited
1007 cleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ at
1008 http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.
1010 * MS-Windows 95/98/ME crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.
1012 When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,
1013 Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. In
1014 particular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Java
1015 program in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the system
1018 * Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.
1020 This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windows
1021 programs do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, many
1022 mouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do something
1023 different. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate a
1024 middle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to
1025 "scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying a
1026 generic mouse driver might help.
1028 * Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.
1030 This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead of
1031 generating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll bar
1032 movement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiple
1033 scroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.
1035 * Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to be
1036 mangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't know
1037 exactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we've
1040 * After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs, the Meta key stops working.
1042 This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed by
1043 Mandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs was
1044 modified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on a
1045 keyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Meta
1046 modifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, which
1047 was not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act as
1048 Meta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.
1050 The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Meta
1051 modifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the left
1052 and to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and see
1053 which combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also use
1054 the `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Meta
1057 xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"
1059 A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifier
1060 is to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system:
1062 xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.ps
1064 This produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of your
1065 keyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show what
1066 keys can serve as Meta.
1068 The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the current
1069 keyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.
1071 * On OSF/Dec Unix/Tru64/<whatever it is this year> under X locally or
1072 remotely, M-SPC acts as a `compose' key with strange results. See
1075 Changing Alt_L to Meta_L fixes it:
1076 % xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_L = Meta_L Alt_L'
1077 % xmodmap -e 'keysym Alt_R = Meta_R Alt_R'
1079 * Error "conflicting types for `initstate'" compiling with GCC on Irix 6.
1081 Install GCC 2.95 or a newer version, and this problem should go away.
1082 It is possible that this problem results from upgrading the operating
1083 system without reinstalling GCC; so you could also try reinstalling
1084 the same version of GCC, and telling us whether that fixes the problem.
1086 * Emacs dumps core on Solaris in function IMCheckWindow.
1088 This was reported to happen when Emacs runs with more than one frame,
1089 and one of them is closed, either with "C-x 5 0" or from the window
1092 This bug was reported to Sun as
1094 Gtk apps dump core in ximlocal.so.2:IMCheckIMWindow()
1095 Bug Reports: 4463537
1097 Installing Solaris 8 patch 108773-12 for Sparc and 108774-12 for x86
1098 reportedly fixes the bug, which appears to be inside the shared
1101 Alternatively, you can configure Emacs with `--with-xim=no' to prevent
1102 the core dump, but will loose X input method support, of course. (You
1103 can use Emacs's own input methods instead, if you install Leim.)
1105 * On Solaris 7, Emacs gets a segmentation fault when starting up using X.
1107 This results from Sun patch 107058-01 (SunOS 5.7: Patch for
1108 assembler) if you use GCC version 2.7 or later.
1109 To work around it, either install patch 106950-03 or later,
1110 or uninstall patch 107058-01, or install the GNU Binutils.
1111 Then recompile Emacs, and it should work.
1113 * With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.
1115 Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem.
1117 --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999
1118 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999
1120 -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
1121 +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */
1122 /******************************************************************
1124 Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED
1131 + char* begin = NULL;
1135 char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER;
1136 @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@
1138 ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2);
1140 - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
1141 + if (begin != NULL) {
1142 + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1);
1146 ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0';
1151 * Emacs crashes on Irix 6.5 on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.
1153 This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.
1155 * Emacs crashes in utmpname on Irix 5.3.
1157 This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.
1158 It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.
1160 * The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.
1162 This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-t
1163 combination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offending
1164 definition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; there
1165 might be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similar
1168 We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, if
1169 you want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.
1171 * On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you use
1172 the fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).
1174 You can fix this by editing the file:
1176 /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/Compose
1178 Near the bottom there is a line that reads:
1180 Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1184 Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequarters
1186 Note the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.
1188 * Emacs on Digital Unix 4.0 fails to build, giving error message
1189 Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160
1191 This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.
1192 Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.
1194 * Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.
1196 Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function cause
1197 problems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function's
1198 documentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.
1200 * Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.
1202 These may have been intercepted by your window manager. In
1203 particular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its default
1204 configuration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by the
1205 configuration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how to
1208 * When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.
1210 When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified
1211 (either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)
1212 then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes are
1213 correct but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, which
1214 gives the appearance of "double spacing".
1216 To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"
1217 feature (in the font part of the configuration window).
1219 * Failure in unexec while dumping emacs on Digital Unix 4.0
1221 This problem manifests itself as an error message
1223 unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...
1225 The user suspects that this happened because his X libraries
1226 were built for an older system version,
1228 ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlib
1230 made the problem go away.
1232 * No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.
1234 This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patches
1237 The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.
1239 * As of version 20.4, Emacs doesn't work properly if configured for
1240 the Motif toolkit and linked against the free LessTif library. The
1241 next Emacs release is expected to work with LessTif.
1243 * Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.
1245 This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs uses
1246 a large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h is
1249 We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.
1251 * Emacs makes HPUX 11.0 crash.
1253 This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.
1255 * Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine (HPUX 10.20).
1257 This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.
1259 * The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed in
1260 Help mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using
1261 `add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook
1262 'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.
1264 * Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2
1265 (alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.
1266 Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,
1269 --- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1
1270 +++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00
1271 @@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti
1272 (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil))
1274 ((stringp entity) ; a file name
1275 - (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))
1276 + (insert-file-contents entity)
1277 (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity)))
1278 ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id?
1279 (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))
1281 * Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUC TeX installed.
1283 Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUC TeX; upgrading should solve
1286 * No colors in AUC TeX with Emacs 21.
1288 Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it is
1289 byte-compiled with Emacs 21.
1291 * Running TeX from AUC TeX package with Emacs 20.3 gives a Lisp error
1292 about a read-only tex output buffer.
1294 This problem appeared for AUC TeX version 9.9j and some earlier
1295 versions. Here is a patch for the file tex-buf.el in the AUC TeX
1298 diff -c auctex/tex-buf.el~ auctex/tex-buf.el
1299 *** auctex/tex-buf.el~ Wed Jul 29 18:35:32 1998
1300 --- auctex/tex-buf.el Sat Sep 5 15:20:38 1998
1303 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1304 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1305 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1306 ! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer)
1309 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1311 (dir (TeX-master-directory)))
1312 (TeX-process-check file) ; Check that no process is running
1313 (setq TeX-command-buffer (current-buffer))
1314 ! (let (temp-buffer-show-function temp-buffer-show-hook)
1315 ! (with-output-to-temp-buffer buffer))
1318 (insert "Running `" name "' on `" file "' with ``" command "''\n")
1320 * On Irix 6.3, substituting environment variables in file names
1321 in the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as
1323 Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""
1325 This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch
1326 003082 August 11, 1998.
1328 * After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.
1330 The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does
1331 (standard-display-european t)
1332 That should be changed to
1333 (standard-display-european 1 t)
1335 * Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.
1337 You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that package
1338 supplies the `install-info' command.
1340 * Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key, on HPUX.
1342 To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executable
1343 rights, containing this text:
1345 --------------------------------
1346 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
1347 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
1348 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
1353 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
1355 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
1356 add mod2 = Mode_switch
1358 --------------------------------
1360 * Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.
1362 This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodically
1363 requests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versions
1364 of klipper don't implement the ICCM protocol for large selections,
1365 which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After a
1366 while, Emacs will print a message:
1368 Timed out waiting for property-notify event
1370 A workaround is to not use `klipper'.
1372 * Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access files
1373 in the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of any
1374 drive, e.g. `c:/dev'.
1376 This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-style
1377 device names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. A
1378 work-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.
1380 * M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.
1382 See if your X server is set up to use this as a command
1383 for character composition.
1385 * Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.
1387 This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get the
1388 full qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the
1389 /etc/hosts file, something like this:
1392 129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04
1394 The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.
1396 * Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs on Digital Unix 4.0.
1398 So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERM
1399 is vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displays
1400 properly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running
1401 `tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fix
1404 * When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.
1406 This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCII
1407 characters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCII
1408 characters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell with
1409 support for 8-bit characters.
1411 To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, type
1412 this at your shell's prompt:
1416 and look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says
1417 "!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise it
1420 To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h file
1421 in the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.
1422 Then rebuild the speller.
1424 Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that the
1425 version of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.
1427 Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a word
1428 in a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use by
1429 Ispell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, because
1430 it uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you are
1431 spelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.
1433 If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that if
1434 you have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), it
1435 can cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'
1436 in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.
1438 * On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through
1439 5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.
1441 This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.
1442 One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 is
1445 * On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-hand
1446 CTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.
1448 This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.
1450 Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates key
1451 events with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannot
1452 distinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl
1453 combination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes that
1454 AltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be set
1455 to nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.
1457 * Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server
1459 If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This was
1460 reported to prevent the crashes.
1462 * Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect
1464 The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of the
1465 screen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selective
1466 display or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screen
1467 to be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.
1469 This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versions
1470 as well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. The
1471 problem lies in the X-server settings.
1473 There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed by
1474 running `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", then
1475 un-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to X
1478 Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Then
1479 please call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.
1480 If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list it
1483 * On Solaris 2, Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.
1485 The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.
1486 Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.
1487 (Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)
1488 You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.
1489 You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;
1490 look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patches
1491 are currently recommended for your host.
1493 On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch
1494 105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.
1495 105284-18 might fix it again.
1497 * On Solaris 2.6 and 7, the Compose key does not work.
1499 This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed for
1500 the next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sun
1501 support complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.
1502 If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.
1504 One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.
1505 For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environment
1506 variable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/locale
1507 lists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"
1510 pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does work
1511 if you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11
1514 * Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.
1516 This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled which
1517 seems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.
1518 To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"
1519 and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".
1521 * Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.
1523 You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,
1524 either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your system
1525 calls for specifying this.
1527 If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variable
1528 mail-host-address to the value you want.
1530 * Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs, on UnixWare 2.1
1532 Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installed
1533 virtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs during
1534 the "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. That
1535 error indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has been
1536 exceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtual
1537 memory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.
1539 You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).
1540 But you have to be root to do it.
1542 According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel:
1544 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit
1545 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard "
1546 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit
1547 # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard "
1548 # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B
1550 (He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)
1551 These changes take effect when you reboot.
1553 * Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.
1555 We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower when
1556 scroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If this
1557 happens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll bars
1558 on the right (as they were in Emacs 19).
1560 Here's how to do this:
1562 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)
1564 If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,
1565 try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things back
1568 (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)
1570 * Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.
1572 Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacs
1573 supports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requires
1574 many different fonts, collected into a fontset.
1576 If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your X
1577 server, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.
1578 You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.
1580 The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that can
1581 display all the characters Emacs supports.
1583 Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have a
1584 missing glyph and no default character. This is known ot occur for
1585 character number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucida
1586 but Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 version
1587 of this character to display a space.
1589 * Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.
1591 You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.
1593 * Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".
1595 This is because these fonts contain characters a little taller
1596 than the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure that
1597 lines do not overlap.
1599 * You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inverse
1600 video, but later frames are not in inverse video.
1602 This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library in
1603 your search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows to
1604 check whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.
1606 * In FreeBSD 2.1.5, useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or other
1607 directories that have the +t bit.
1609 This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).
1610 Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directory
1611 with +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symbolic
1612 link, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.
1614 If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to using
1615 file lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.
1617 * When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'
1618 commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.
1620 You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit':
1622 dbxenv output_short_file_name off
1624 * Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actually
1627 This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if the
1628 remote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFS
1629 implementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do to
1630 detect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the system
1631 calls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the case
1632 where the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.
1634 * "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.
1636 If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, you
1637 will get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"
1638 in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versions
1639 did not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to do
1640 character composition in the standard X way. This means that you
1641 must pick one meaning or the other for any given key.
1643 You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assign
1644 them to two different keys.
1646 * Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup, on AIX4.2.
1648 If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.c
1649 without optimization; that should avoid the problem.
1651 * movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.
1653 Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the services
1654 NIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as the
1655 entry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to be
1656 listening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, while
1657 the client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for the
1660 * Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.
1662 This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants to
1663 use. You can work around the problem by specifying another font with
1664 an X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font that
1665 happens to exist on your X server).
1667 * Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.
1669 This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You can
1670 prevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')
1671 to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.
1673 Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'
1674 (src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.
1676 * Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on HPUX 9 after you delete a frame.
1678 We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. With
1679 the alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problem
1682 * Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.
1684 We suspect that this is a similar bug in the X libraries provided by
1685 Sun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug and
1686 makes the problem stop:
1688 105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02
1689 105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03
1690 106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01
1691 105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01
1693 Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)
1694 suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:
1696 106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch
1697 106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes
1698 105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch
1700 * Problems running Perl under Emacs on MS-Windows NT/95.
1702 `perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.
1703 The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).
1705 The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to
1706 "CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interacting
1709 On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates a
1710 pseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using to
1711 communicate with the subprocess.
1713 On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for the
1714 relevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot be
1715 redirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess as
1718 A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.
1722 *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993
1723 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996
1730 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1738 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1743 *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995
1744 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996
1751 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1759 $rcfile="perldb.ini";
1763 * Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs:
1765 There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems:
1767 * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get
1768 `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com';
1769 * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.
1771 To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdos
1772 subdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and link
1773 them into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace the
1774 incorrect library functions.
1776 * When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.
1778 If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is because
1779 Windows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with a
1780 program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by
1781 config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to
1782 the front of your PATH environment variable.
1784 * When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targets
1787 This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environment
1788 variable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and during
1789 compilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL for
1790 the explanation of how to avoid this problem.
1792 * Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or other
1793 run-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.
1795 Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exits
1796 immediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot find
1797 the Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdout
1798 and stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.
1800 Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to load
1801 the support for editing program sources in languages such as C and
1804 This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFN
1805 support, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6
1806 characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.
1807 You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports long
1808 filenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip program
1809 compiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALL
1810 explains this issue in more detail.
1812 Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled for
1813 MSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supported
1814 by this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by an
1815 unzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncating
1816 them to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacs
1817 must be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names are
1820 * Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup:
1822 "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"
1824 This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacs
1825 on MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if the
1826 value of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs then
1827 works as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn't
1828 support faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to be
1829 undefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an
1830 [emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for
1831 `TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest of
1832 your system works as before.
1834 * On MS-Windows 95, Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.
1836 This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.
1837 You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.
1839 * Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.
1841 This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. If
1842 you proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Alt
1843 and Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. A
1844 more permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,
1845 or disable it in the keyboard control panel.
1847 * `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.
1849 This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, in
1850 version 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide a
1851 definition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is also
1852 incompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo support
1853 does not work with this version of ncurses.
1855 The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.
1857 * Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.
1859 If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
1860 systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
1861 ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
1862 cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
1863 libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
1864 obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.
1866 The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
1867 the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
1868 symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
1869 it constitutes a separate package.
1871 * Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.
1873 Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part of
1874 editfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler such
1877 * Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomly truncated
1878 on GNU/Linux systems.
1880 This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version
1883 * Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.
1885 There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16
1886 caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but the
1887 problem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that it
1888 is actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.
1890 Using the old library version is a workaround.
1892 * On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).
1894 This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the precise
1895 version of Solaris that you are using.
1897 * Emacs dumps core on startup, on Solaris.
1899 Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch
1900 102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the Solaris
1901 Common Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problem
1902 by removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.
1903 However, that linker version won't work with CDE.
1905 Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that if
1906 you install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.
1907 We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't know
1910 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes)
1911 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes)
1912 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)
1914 (One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches together
1915 with patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)
1917 If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tell
1918 bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
1920 Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 and
1923 * Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called, on Solaris.
1925 If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2
1926 of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol is
1927 called. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.
1929 * "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes on HPUX, in
1930 Emacs built with Motif.
1932 This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versions
1933 such as 2.7.0 fix the problem.
1935 * On Irix 6.0, make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi
1937 A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"
1938 in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,
1939 find that string, and take out the spaces.
1941 Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.
1943 * "out of virtual swap space" on Irix 5.3
1945 This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to too
1946 many large programs running. The solution is either to provide more
1947 swap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. You
1948 can check the current status of the swap space by executing the
1951 You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding a
1954 /usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0
1956 where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instance
1957 by using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size of
1958 that file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate the
1959 new swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for further
1962 The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can be
1963 swamped with NIS information. It collects information about all users
1964 on the network that can log on to the host.
1966 If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can execute
1967 the command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disable
1968 some of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROM
1971 You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'
1972 FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35
1973 ("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found at
1974 ftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.
1976 * With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the
1977 character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.
1979 One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem went
1980 away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was
1981 XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.
1983 * On SunOS 4.1.3, Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.
1985 This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'
1986 on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the precise
1987 version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which
1988 it can do perfectly well for SunOS).
1990 * On SunOS 4, Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server
1991 (or log out, if you logged in using X).
1993 Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.
1995 * On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer
1996 with an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".
1998 On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.
1999 `unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic Terminal
2000 Definitions" to make them defined.
2002 * On SunOS, you get linker errors
2003 ld: Undefined symbol
2004 _get_wmShellWidgetClass
2005 _get_applicationShellWidgetClass
2007 The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0
2008 or link libXmu statically.
2010 * On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as
2011 ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table
2012 of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.
2014 This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing
2015 these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where
2018 cp /usr/lib/libIM.a .
2022 Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in
2025 * Unpredictable segmentation faults on Solaris 2.3 and 2.4.
2027 A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled with
2028 the Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.
2030 We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.
2032 * Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for
2035 A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.
2036 Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have the
2039 * Emacs crashes at startup on MSDOS.
2041 Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,
2042 and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yet
2043 know why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough real
2044 memory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.
2045 However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.
2047 You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 without
2048 arguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For more
2049 information about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgpp
2050 is the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)
2052 Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memory
2053 configuration. If you experience problems during compilation, consider
2054 removing some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)
2055 and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. See
2056 the djgpp faq for configuration hints.
2058 * A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.
2060 twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.
2061 You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file:
2063 UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position
2065 * Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.
2067 This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solve
2068 the problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun
2069 Emacs's configure script.
2071 * Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.
2073 This results from a bug in GNU Sed version 2.03. To solve the
2074 problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs's
2077 * On Sunos 4.1.1, there are errors compiling sysdep.c.
2079 If you get errors such as
2081 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
2082 "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union
2083 "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefined
2085 This can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very tricky
2086 to use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configure
2087 script links many test programs with the system libraries; you must
2088 make sure that the libraries available to configure are the same
2089 ones available when you build Emacs.
2091 * The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps
2092 other non-English HP keyboards too).
2094 This is because HPUX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a
2095 shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE
2096 configures the X server.
2098 xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF
2099 keysym Alt_L = Meta_L
2100 keysym Alt_R = Meta_R
2105 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol
2107 keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch
2108 add mod2 = Mode_switch
2111 * The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.
2113 Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit
2114 command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use
2115 Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window
2116 manager to use some other command. You can disable the
2117 shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults:
2119 OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False
2121 * Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.
2123 There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice and
2124 that replacing the mouse made it stop.
2126 * Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys.
2128 The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to
2129 be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able
2130 to allocate ptys reliably.
2132 * On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.
2134 The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the
2135 Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset
2136 compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy
2137 workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of
2140 * Slow startup on Linux-based GNU systems.
2142 People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that
2143 startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.
2145 This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.
2146 Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to
2147 improper system configuration. This problem can occur for both
2148 networked and non-networked machines.
2150 Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.
2154 First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' both
2155 exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this
2156 (replace HOSTNAME with your host name):
2160 Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following
2166 Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be
2167 indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local
2168 database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections
2169 dynamically allocate ip addresses).
2171 ** Non-Networked Case
2173 The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.
2174 However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use a
2175 simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command
2176 `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'
2177 file is not necessary with this approach.
2179 * On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs
2180 forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.
2182 casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so
2183 after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines
2186 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2191 #if OSMinorVersion < 4
2193 #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread
2197 Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4
2198 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for
2199 OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under
2200 Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the
2201 definition for your type of machine and system.
2203 Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild
2204 the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on
2205 Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3.
2207 For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch
2208 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need
2209 to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that
2212 However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:
2214 #define ThreadedX YES
2216 #define ThreadedX NO
2217 in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all
2218 `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and
2219 typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.
2221 * With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice
2222 to do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.
2224 This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,
2225 with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to use
2226 another escape character in kermit. One user did
2228 set escape-character 17
2230 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.
2232 * The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.
2234 This has been observed to result from the following X resource:
2236 Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*
2238 That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but we
2239 do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can
2240 explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing
2241 the resource prevents the problem.
2243 * Emacs gets hung shortly after startup, on Sunos 4.1.3.
2245 We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is that
2246 one of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:
2248 100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01
2249 100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01
2250 100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01
2251 100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02
2252 100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01
2254 We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find out
2255 which ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
2257 * Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.
2259 This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC was
2260 installed incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is to
2261 specify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makes
2262 corrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to use
2263 the corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.
2264 Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system header
2265 files to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in the
2266 original system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacs
2269 The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedir
2270 when you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includedir
2271 is appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be the
2272 same directory where system header files are kept.
2274 * On Solaris 2.x, GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported"
2276 This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely you
2277 are using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); this
2278 does not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 or
2279 later, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch as
2280 described in the Solaris FAQ
2281 <http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix is
2282 to upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.
2284 * The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.
2286 This shell command should fix it:
2288 xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'
2290 * Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.
2292 On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled
2293 with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C
2294 version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick
2295 C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with
2298 * On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.
2300 This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant
2301 for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete
2302 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.
2304 * You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).
2306 On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menus
2307 works properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when you
2308 bring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, in
2311 This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure is
2312 due to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one really
2313 knows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps a
2314 workaround can be found.
2316 * Unusable default font on SCO 3.2v4.
2318 The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settings
2319 that tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use such
2320 fonts, so it does not work.
2322 This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which is
2323 the application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminal
2324 emulator program. It contains several extremely general X resources
2325 that affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, these
2326 resources affect Emacs also:
2328 *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-*
2329 *Background: scoBackground
2330 *Foreground: scoForeground
2332 The best solution is to create an application-specific resource file for
2333 Emacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents:
2335 Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1
2336 Emacs*Background: white
2337 Emacs*Foreground: black
2339 (These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them to
2340 suit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X server
2341 starts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktop
2342 environment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shell
2343 as root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the
2344 /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,
2345 but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use the
2346 Open Desktop display.
2348 These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCO
2349 machines; you must create the file on each machine individually.
2351 * rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".
2353 This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.
2354 The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).
2356 * Emacs is slow using X11R5 on HP/UX.
2358 This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--it
2359 doesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the version
2360 because they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,
2361 libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come with
2362 those libraries installed. To get good performance, you need to
2363 install them and rebuild Emacs.
2365 * Loading fonts is very slow.
2367 You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.
2368 Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A font
2369 directory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file
2372 If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalable
2373 font directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.
2375 With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable font
2376 directories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.
2377 Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.
2379 * On AIX 3.2.4, releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.
2381 Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key is
2382 ignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This can
2383 lead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters are
2384 treated as control characters.
2386 You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing and
2387 releasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.
2389 * display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.
2391 Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably other
2392 versions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENT
2393 cells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.
2394 This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make other
2395 processes die, in particular pcnfsd.
2397 Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may have
2398 the same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.
2400 The only known fix: Don't run display-time.
2402 * On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.
2404 This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-r
2405 C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.
2407 * Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed by
2408 segmentation fault and core dump.
2410 This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneously
2411 added a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code:
2413 x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocks
2415 If your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage to
2418 * Link failure when using acc on a Sun.
2420 To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as
2422 /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1
2424 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.
2426 The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we
2427 cannot easily arrange to supply them.
2429 * Link failure on IBM AIX 1.3 ptf 0013.
2431 There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' in
2432 the library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). The
2436 ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2437 ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o
2439 * Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose on a Sun.
2441 If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linking
2442 with -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c in
2443 the MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using shared
2444 libraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the X
2447 If you get the additional error that the linker could not find
2448 lib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a in
2449 X11R4, then use it in the link.
2451 * Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'
2453 This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.
2454 Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now because
2455 Emacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also calls
2456 where-is-internal in an obsolete way.
2458 So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.
2460 * In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.
2462 This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be too
2463 smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns
2464 on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the
2465 problem by adding this to your .cshrc file:
2468 if ($EMACS == "t") then
2470 stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z
2474 * An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid
2475 parameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.
2477 This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as
2479 (which is invalid because it specifies a color name for something
2480 that isn't a color.)
2482 The fix is to correct your X resources.
2484 * Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1 using --with-x-toolkit.
2486 If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,
2487 _iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after
2488 -lXaw in the command that links temacs.
2490 This problem seems to arise only when the international language
2491 extensions to X11R5 are installed.
2493 * Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.
2495 This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround is
2496 to define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.
2497 Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.
2499 * src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.
2501 This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version
2502 had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.
2504 * Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.
2506 If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your X
2507 resources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 font
2508 renderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1
2511 One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts from
2512 your font path, like this:
2514 xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/
2516 * Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.
2518 An X resource of this form can cause the problem:
2520 Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0
2522 This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menus
2523 individually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what you
2524 want, rewrite the resource.
2526 To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb
2527 -query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look at
2528 the user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.
2530 * --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.
2532 On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,
2533 unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the X
2534 toolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonshared
2535 libXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions of
2536 unexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4
2537 and Solaris in version 19.29.
2539 * `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.
2541 This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tar
2542 commands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be in
2543 Emacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc by
2546 * --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong on BSD/386.
2548 This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.
2549 The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,
2552 * Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies, on Sunos 5.3.
2554 A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacs
2555 exits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it only
2556 applies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocesses
2557 communicating through pipes.
2559 * Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.
2561 Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the
2562 sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be
2563 delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)
2564 program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which
2565 means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the
2566 command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to
2567 obtain the destination address.
2569 There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.
2570 In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize
2571 non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris
2572 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS
2573 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which
2574 have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time
2575 of this writing, these official versions are available:
2577 Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail:
2578 sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation)
2579 sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files)
2580 sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs)
2581 sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript)
2583 IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub:
2584 sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz
2586 * On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs:
2588 Could not load program emacs
2589 Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined
2590 Error was: Exec format error
2594 Could not load program .emacs
2595 Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined
2596 Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined
2597 Error was: Exec format error
2599 These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was
2600 compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.
2602 * On AIX, you get this compiler error message:
2604 Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h
2605 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.
2607 This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.d
2608 libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install
2609 X11Dev... with smit.
2611 * You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.
2613 This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysym
2614 Multi_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11
2615 character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose key
2616 to do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.
2618 For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key:
2620 xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"
2622 If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta to
2623 Compose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding the
2624 xmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.
2626 * C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.
2628 You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even
2629 though the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,
2630 or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.
2632 * Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars
2634 These control the actions of Emacs.
2635 ~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.
2636 EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function
2639 If you observe strange problems, check for these and get rid
2640 of them, then try again.
2642 * After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.
2644 Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the
2645 mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly
2646 the first time, and then crash when run a second time.
2648 Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,
2649 you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your
2650 operating system description file (whose name is reported by the
2651 configure script) that reads:
2652 #define SYSTEM_MALLOC
2653 This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around
2656 * Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating
2657 directly with an X server.
2659 If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it
2660 does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is
2661 whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c
2662 followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event
2663 it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you
2664 have made the key binding correctly.
2666 If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may
2667 be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X
2668 server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by
2671 If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows:
2673 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L'
2674 xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'
2676 If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of those
2677 commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you
2678 are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any
2679 modifier bit not otherwise used.
2681 If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other
2682 keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or
2683 some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the
2684 commands show above to make them modifier keys.
2686 Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt
2687 into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.
2689 * `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'
2691 On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFS
2692 file system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and
2693 does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default
2694 value is just ten seconds.
2696 If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.
2698 * `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.
2700 On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information
2701 in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using
2702 expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work
2703 in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.
2705 The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in
2706 anything it loads. Yuck - some solution.
2708 I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is
2709 going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.
2710 Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included
2711 in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.
2713 * On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.
2715 Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solves
2716 the problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; be
2717 sure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.
2719 * Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.
2721 Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.
2723 * Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though
2724 the names work properly with other programs on the same system.
2725 * Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.
2726 * GNUs can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.
2728 This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared
2729 libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the
2730 shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a
2731 similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.
2733 The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with
2734 the nameserver, but Emacs does not.
2736 The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you
2737 installed in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.
2739 On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.
2741 If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,
2742 then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way to
2743 do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE
2744 or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro
2745 that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,
2746 be careful not to lose the others.
2748 Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:
2750 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv
2752 Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that
2753 the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h
2756 #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar
2758 * On a Sun running SunOS 4.1.1, you get this error message from GNU ld:
2760 /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segment
2762 The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.
2764 The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.
2766 * Self documentation messages are garbled.
2768 This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspond
2769 with the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing the
2770 corresponding pair of files should fix the problem.
2772 * Trouble using ptys on AIX.
2774 People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.
2775 Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.
2777 * Shell mode on HP/UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".
2779 christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:
2781 The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to
2782 execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then
2783 tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,
2784 but tty is giving it back 3.
2786 The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single
2789 if (`tty` == "/dev/console")
2791 should be changed to:
2793 if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")
2795 Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc
2798 * Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.
2800 Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.
2802 * Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.
2803 * `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.
2805 One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) in
2806 your .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH in
2809 * Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.
2811 If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or
2812 `ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicates
2813 that you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,
2814 with a floating point option other than the default.
2816 It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes in
2817 crt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.
2818 However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the default
2819 floating point option: -fsoft.
2821 * Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.
2823 The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rd
2824 arguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h to
2825 tell Emacs to compensate for this.
2827 I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itself
2828 whether this problem is present on a given system.
2830 * Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserver
2833 This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use
2834 7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.
2836 * M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".
2838 This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunos
2839 version 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.
2841 * Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'
2844 The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP
2845 environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to
2846 provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs
2849 Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP
2850 in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets
2851 it only if it is undefined.
2853 if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file
2855 Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not
2856 happen in a non-login shell.
2858 * X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.
2860 People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacs
2861 not to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. But
2862 the problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I think
2863 the bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.
2865 You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).
2866 However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so that
2867 you are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.
2869 The easy way to do this is to put
2871 (setq x-sigio-bug t)
2873 in your site-init.el file.
2875 * Problem with remote X server on Suns.
2877 On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on another
2878 may not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. This
2879 is because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.
2880 As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.
2882 * Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain
2884 You may find that M-x shell prints the following message:
2886 Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...
2888 This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.
2889 Here is how to make more of them.
2893 # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7)
2895 # creates eight new pty's
2897 * Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump
2899 This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by the
2900 Makefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.
2902 It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swapping
2903 space available on the machine.
2905 On 68000's, it has also happened because of bugs in the
2906 subroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, even
2907 for large blocks (many pages).
2909 * test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered
2910 * or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127"
2911 * or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.
2912 * or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs
2914 This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be
2915 fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are
2916 binary files and can contain all 256 byte values.
2918 In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.
2919 It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" in
2920 a binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'
2921 itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characters
2922 when unpacking the shell archive.
2924 I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not know
2925 what transfer means caused this problem. Various network
2926 file transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.
2928 If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its
2929 nonprinting characters, you can fix them:
2931 1) Record the names of all the .elc files.
2932 2) Delete all the .elc files.
2933 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large.
2934 (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o.
2935 4) Remake emacs. It should work now.
2936 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly
2937 to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist.
2938 You may need to increase the value of the variable
2939 max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted
2940 on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report.
2941 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any)
2943 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.
2945 * temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted"
2947 This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .el
2948 files during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up more
2949 space than was allocated.
2951 This could be caused by
2952 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files
2953 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el
2954 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files.
2955 Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard;
2956 if you have received Emacs from some other site
2957 and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider
2959 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files
2960 (not from the directory you expected).
2961 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist.
2962 This would cause the source files (.el files) to be
2963 loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose.
2964 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates
2967 If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definition
2968 of PURESIZE in puresize.h.
2970 But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequence
2971 of something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the real
2974 * Changes made to .el files do not take effect.
2976 You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.
2977 Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changes
2978 will not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directory
2979 and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.
2981 Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is older
2982 than the corresponding .el file.
2984 * The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.
2986 Two causes have been seen for such problems.
2988 1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is defined
2989 as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,
2990 it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct
2991 value in the man page for a.out (5).
2993 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the
2994 initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most
2995 of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and
2996 not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you
2997 may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.
2999 * Compilation errors on VMS.
3001 You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there are
3002 variable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.
3003 This is not an error. Ignore it.
3005 VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this construct
3006 were removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.
3008 There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend characters
3009 in conditional expressions. The bug is:
3014 The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in the
3015 conditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of such
3016 constructs in Emacs have been fixed.
3018 * rmail gets error getting new mail
3020 rmail gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program
3021 called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using
3022 the protocol defined by /bin/mail.
3024 There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses
3025 the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;
3026 `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do
3027 this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,
3028 the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.
3029 IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR
3030 SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!
3032 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
3033 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
3034 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
3035 `mail'. You can use these commands (as root):
3040 If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions
3041 prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,
3042 you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as
3043 `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the
3049 Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an
3050 installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The
3051 installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory
3052 /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and
3053 mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build
3054 directory copy is ineffective.
3056 * Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.
3058 This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being
3059 used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes
3060 away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long
3061 streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a
3062 user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a
3063 properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible
3064 input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is
3065 easy, for a person with at least half a brain.
3067 There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place:
3069 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control
3070 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use
3071 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsible
3073 First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether
3074 they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to
3075 "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an
3076 escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off
3077 and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow
3078 control off, and the `te' string should turn it on.
3080 Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it
3081 needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled
3082 by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud
3083 rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print
3084 your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if
3085 it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If
3086 the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a
3087 problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard
3088 to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.
3090 For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just
3091 giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control
3092 codes. You might as well try it.
3094 If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer
3095 through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the
3096 computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how
3097 much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow
3098 control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),
3099 you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator
3100 replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic
3101 measures can make Emacs semi-work.
3103 You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system
3104 handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x
3105 enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are
3106 now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x
3107 enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow
3110 If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them
3111 is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose
3112 other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement
3113 and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all
3114 other control characters are already used by emacs.
3116 IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,
3117 Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in
3120 If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a
3121 certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function
3122 `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme
3123 automatically. Here is an example:
3125 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
3127 If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled
3128 and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control
3131 I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the
3132 assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow
3133 control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad
3134 merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming
3135 widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some
3136 use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I
3137 will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake
3138 of inferior systems.
3140 * Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.
3142 For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow
3143 control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your
3144 terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator
3145 that wants to use flow control.
3147 You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.
3148 If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without
3149 flow control, as described in the preceding section.
3151 If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters
3152 into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above
3153 shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.
3155 * Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.
3157 Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow
3158 control characters to the remote system to which they connect.
3159 On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow
3160 control on the local system.
3162 One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host
3163 (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the
3164 stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,
3165 "stty start u stop u" will do this.
3167 Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way
3168 around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and
3169 issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.
3171 If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type
3172 M-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, or
3173 if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the
3174 following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):
3176 (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")
3178 See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more
3181 * Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.
3183 This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that
3184 terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing
3185 the combination of features specified for that terminal.
3187 The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters
3188 Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression
3189 (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all
3190 terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do
3191 what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file
3192 and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.
3193 There are several possibilities:
3195 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.
3197 In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you
3198 need more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.
3200 2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect
3201 of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way
3204 This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way for
3205 Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior
3206 and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are
3207 classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for
3208 Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be
3209 tested on many kinds of terminals.
3211 3) The termcap entry is wrong.
3213 See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes
3214 that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries
3215 for certain terminals.
3217 4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be
3218 right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.
3220 This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixed
3221 in termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.
3223 * Output from Control-V is slow.
3225 On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.
3226 Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use fails
3227 to inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screen
3228 before a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top after
3229 the Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,
3230 it will scroll them to the top of the screen.
3232 If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason is
3233 that the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does not
3234 specify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacs
3235 concludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes to
3236 send the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You must
3237 fix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as much
3238 time as the operations really take.
3240 Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send characters
3241 at a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for the
3242 terminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminals
3243 operated across networks, often the network provides some sort of
3244 flow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slow
3245 an operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you want
3246 Emacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This will
3247 cause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they do
3248 not really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrolling
3249 is happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.
3251 Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deleting
3252 multiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in the
3253 termcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will have
3254 fast output without wasted padding characters. These strings should
3255 each contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of lines
3256 to be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap
3259 You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminal
3260 has a command to insert or delete multiple characters. These
3261 take the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.
3263 A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amount
3264 of motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.
3266 * Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm.
3268 The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines:
3270 *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f)
3271 aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?
3273 This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).
3275 * You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.
3277 Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappear
3280 The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused by
3281 the fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type another
3282 character) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletion
3283 of text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure to
3284 overprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conforming
3287 For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,
3288 and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousand
3289 other control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;
3290 but there are not very many other control characters, and I think
3291 that providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is more
3292 important than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.
3294 If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,
3295 you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file:
3296 (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)
3297 You can probably access help-command via f1.
3299 * Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.
3300 It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,
3301 but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug that
3304 There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system
3305 call in the RFS server.
3307 The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the
3308 close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very
3309 many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files
3310 to make sure that the bits are on the disk.
3312 This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server.
3314 The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a
3315 non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that
3316 gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is
3317 a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it
3318 as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync
3319 is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS
3320 protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem.
3322 (as always, your line numbers may vary)
3324 % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3325 RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v
3326 retrieving revision 1.2
3327 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c
3328 *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987
3329 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987
3333 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3335 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync)
3336 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3341 * No return sent for close or fsync!
3343 ! if (syscall == RSYS_close)
3344 proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]);
3348 * Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.
3350 You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs:
3352 foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG
3353 foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccom
3355 These are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.
3356 Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same construct
3357 may compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, depending
3358 on what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changes
3359 in header files that should not affect the file being compiled
3360 can affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes files
3361 that compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.
3363 As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affect
3364 you. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but more
3365 can always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if it
3366 should happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to an
3367 array of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call:
3370 ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...
3371 putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in
3376 ... foo (r, tem, ...)...
3377 causes the problem to go away.
3378 The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,
3379 so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.
3381 * 68000 C compiler problems
3383 Various 68000 compilers have different problems.
3384 These are some that have been observed.
3386 ** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.
3387 This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not work
3388 if x is of type Lisp_Object.
3390 ** "cannot reclaim" error.
3392 This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correct
3393 line number in the error message. The code must be rewritten with
3394 simpler expressions.
3396 ** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.
3398 If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.
3399 Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:
3401 struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };
3406 test ((int *) arg.y);
3409 If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.
3410 In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with
3411 ((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.
3413 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3414 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.
3416 * C compilers lose on returning unions
3418 I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.
3419 Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which is
3420 defined as a union on some rare architectures.
3422 This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your type
3423 of machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.
3426 Copyright 1987,88,89,93,94,95,96,97,98,1999,2001,2002
3427 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3429 Copying and redistribution of this file with or without modification
3430 are permitted without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
3434 paragraph-separate: "[
\f]*$"
3437 arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a