This file describes various problems that have been encounteredin compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs. Try doing Ctl-C Ctl-tand browsing through the outline headers.* Emacs startup failures** Emacs fails to start, complaining about missing fonts.A typical error message might be something like No fonts match `-*-fixed-medium-r-*--6-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1'This happens because some X resource specifies a bad font family forEmacs to use. The possible places where this specification might beare: - in your ~/.Xdefaults file - client-side X resource file, such as ~/Emacs or /usr/X11R6/lib/app-defaults/Emacs or /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/EmacsOne of these files might have bad or malformed specification of afontset that Emacs should use. To fix the problem, you need to findthe problematic line(s) and correct them.** Emacs aborts while starting up, only when run without X.This problem often results from compiling Emacs with GCC when GCC wasinstalled incorrectly. The usual error in installing GCC is tospecify --includedir=/usr/include. Installation of GCC makescorrected copies of the system header files. GCC is supposed to usethe corrected copies in preference to the original system headers.Specifying --includedir=/usr/include causes the original system headerfiles to be used. On some systems, the definition of ioctl in theoriginal system header files is invalid for ANSI C and causes Emacsnot to work.The fix is to reinstall GCC, and this time do not specify --includedirwhen you configure it. Then recompile Emacs. Specifying --includediris appropriate only in very special cases and it should *never* be thesame directory where system header files are kept.** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modernsystems do), this could happen if the proper version ofncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. itcannot be found along the usual path the linker looks forlibraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses isobsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses inthe developer's form (header files, static libraries andsymbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)it constitutes a separate package.** Emacs 20 and later fails to load Lisp files at startup.The typical error message might be like this: "Cannot open load file: fontset"This could happen if you compress the file lisp/subdirs.el. That filetells Emacs what are the directories where it should look for Lispfiles. Emacs cannot work with subdirs.el compressed, since theAuto-compress mode it needs for this will not be loaded until later,when your .emacs file is processed. (The package `fontset.el' isrequired to set up fonts used to display text on window systems, andit's loaded very early in the startup procedure.)Similarly, any other .el file for which there's no corresponding .elcfile could fail to load if it is compressed.The solution is to uncompress all .el files which don't have a .elcfile.Another possible reason for such failures is stale *.elc fileslurking somewhere on your load-path. The following command willprint any duplicate Lisp files that are present in load-path: emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadowsIf this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,and should be deleted or their directories removed from yourload-path.** Emacs prints an error at startup after upgrading from an earlier version.An example of such an error is: x-complement-fontset-spec: "Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"This can be another symptom of stale *.elc files in your load-path.The following command will print any duplicate Lisp files that arepresent in load-path: emacs -q -batch -f list-load-path-shadowsIf this command prints any file names, some of these files are stale,and should be deleted or their directories removed from yourload-path.** With X11R6.4, public-patch-3, Emacs crashes at startup.Reportedly this patch in X fixes the problem. --- xc/lib/X11/imInt.c~ Wed Jun 30 13:31:56 1999 +++ xc/lib/X11/imInt.c Thu Jul 1 15:10:27 1999 @@ -1,4 +1,4 @@ -/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */ +/* $TOG: imInt.c /main/5 1998/05/30 21:11:16 kaleb $ */ /****************************************************************** Copyright 1992, 1993, 1994 by FUJITSU LIMITED @@ -166,8 +166,8 @@ _XimMakeImName(lcd) XLCd lcd; { - char* begin; - char* end; + char* begin = NULL; + char* end = NULL; char* ret; int i = 0; char* ximmodifier = XIMMODIFIER; @@ -182,7 +182,11 @@ } ret = Xmalloc(end - begin + 2); if (ret != NULL) { - (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1); + if (begin != NULL) { + (void)strncpy(ret, begin, end - begin + 1); + } else { + ret[0] = '\0'; + } ret[end - begin + 1] = '\0'; } return ret;* Crash bugs** Emacs crashes in x-popup-dialog.This can happen if the dialog widget cannot find the font it wants touse. You can work around the problem by specifying another font withan X resource--for example, `Emacs.dialog*.font: 9x15' (or any font thathappens to exist on your X server).** Emacs crashes when you use Bibtex mode.This happens if your system puts a small limit on stack size. You canprevent the problem by using a suitable shell command (often `ulimit')to raise the stack size limit before you run Emacs.Patches to raise the stack size limit automatically in `main'(src/emacs.c) on various systems would be greatly appreciated.** Error message `Symbol's value as variable is void: x', followed bya segmentation fault and core dump.This has been tracked to a bug in tar! People report that tar erroneouslyadded a line like this at the beginning of files of Lisp code: x FILENAME, N bytes, B tape blocksIf your tar has this problem, install GNU tar--if you can manage tountar it :-).** Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with versionlibungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occurif a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with anolder version.** Emacs aborts inside the function `tparam1'.This can happen if Emacs was built without terminfo support, but theterminal's capabilities use format that is only supported by terminfo.If your system has ncurses installed, this might happen if yourversion of ncurses is broken; upgrading to a newer version of ncursesand reconfiguring and rebuilding Emacs should solve this.All modern systems support terminfo, so even if ncurses is not theproblem, you should look for a way to configure Emacs so that it usesterminfo when built.** Emacs crashes when using the Exceed 6.0 X server.If you are using Exceed 6.1, upgrade to a later version. This wasreported to prevent the crashes.** Emacs crashes with SIGSEGV in XtInitializeWidgetClass.It crashes on X, but runs fine when called with option "-nw".This has been observed when Emacs is linked with GNU ld but without passingthe -z nocombreloc flag. Emacs normally knows to pass the -z nocombrelocflag when needed, so if you come across a situation where the flag isnecessary but missing, please report it via M-x report-emacs-bug.On platforms such as Solaris, you can also work around this problem byconfiguring your compiler to use the native linker instead of GNU ld.* General runtime problems** Lisp problems*** Changes made to .el files do not take effect.You may have forgotten to recompile them into .elc files.Then the old .elc files will be loaded, and your changeswill not be seen. To fix this, do M-x byte-recompile-directoryand specify the directory that contains the Lisp files.Emacs should print a warning when loading a .elc file which is olderthan the corresponding .el file.*** Watch out for .emacs files and EMACSLOADPATH environment vars.These control the actions of Emacs.~/.emacs is your Emacs init file.EMACSLOADPATH overrides which directories the function"load" will search.If you observe strange problems, check for these and get ridof them, then try again.*** Using epop3.el package causes Emacs to signal an error.The error message might be something like this: "Lisp nesting exceeds max-lisp-eval-depth"This happens because epop3 redefines the function gethash, which is abuilt-in primitive beginning with Emacs 21.1. We don't have a patchfor epop3 that fixes this, but perhaps a newer version of epop3corrects that.*** Buffers from `with-output-to-temp-buffer' get set up in Help mode.Changes in Emacs 20.4 to the hooks used by that function causeproblems for some packages, specifically BBDB. See the function'sdocumentation for the hooks involved. BBDB 2.00.06 fixes the problem.*** The Hyperbole package causes *Help* buffers not to be displayed inHelp mode due to setting `temp-buffer-show-hook' rather than using`add-hook'. Using `(add-hook 'temp-buffer-show-hook'help-mode-maybe)' after loading Hyperbole should fix this.** Keyboard problems*** "Compose Character" key does strange things when used as a Meta key.If you define one key to serve as both Meta and Compose Character, youwill get strange results. In previous Emacs versions, this "worked"in that the key acted as Meta--that's because the older Emacs versionsdid not try to support Compose Character. Now Emacs tries to docharacter composition in the standard X way. This means that youmust pick one meaning or the other for any given key.You can use both functions (Meta, and Compose Character) if you assignthem to two different keys.*** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs.You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, eventhough the system itself is capable of it. Either use a different shell,or set the variable `cannot-suspend' to a non-nil value.*** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twiceto do incremental search--a single C-\ gets no response.This has been traced to communicating with your machine via kermit,with C-\ as the kermit escape character. One solution is to useanother escape character in kermit. One user did set escape-character 17in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character.** Mailers and other helper programs*** movemail compiled with POP support can't connect to the POP server.Make sure that the `pop' entry in /etc/services, or in the servicesNIS map if your machine uses NIS, has the same port number as theentry on the POP server. A common error is for the POP server to belistening on port 110, the assigned port for the POP3 protocol, whilethe client is trying to connect on port 109, the assigned port for theold POP protocol.*** RMAIL gets error getting new mail.RMAIL gets new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a programcalled `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail usingthe protocol defined by /bin/mail.There are two different protocols in general use. One of them usesthe `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file;`movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to dothis. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining,the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes.IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOURSYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL!If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictionsprevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as`mail'. You can use these commands (as root): chgrp mail movemail chmod 2755 movemailIf your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictionsprevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail,you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as`mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing themake install. chgrp mail movemail chmod 2755 movemailInstallation normally copies movemail from the build directory to aninstallation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. Theinstalled copy of movemail is usually in the directory/usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group andmode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the builddirectory copy is ineffective.*** rcs2log gives you the awk error message "too many fields".This is due to an arbitrary limit in certain versions of awk.The solution is to use gawk (GNU awk).** Problems with hostname resolution*** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even thoughthe names work properly with other programs on the same system.*** Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0.*** Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp.This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use sharedlibraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of theshared library which uses a name server--but has not installed asimilar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses.The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work withthe nameserver, but Emacs does not.The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what youinstalled in the shared library, and then relink Emacs.On SunOS 4.1, simply define HAVE_RES_INIT.If you have already installed the name resolver in the file libresolv.a,then you need to compile Emacs to use that library. The easiest way todo this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINEor LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macrothat is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries,be careful not to lose the others.Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h:#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolvThen if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see thatthe s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.hagain to say this:#define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar*** Emacs does not know your host's fully-qualified domain name.You need to configure your machine with a fully qualified domain name,either in /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, the NIS, or wherever your systemcalls for specifying this.If you cannot fix the configuration, you can set the Lisp variablemail-host-address to the value you want.** NFS and RFS*** Emacs says it has saved a file, but the file does not actuallyappear on disk.This can happen on certain systems when you are using NFS, if theremote disk is full. It is due to a bug in NFS (or certain NFSimplementations), and there is apparently nothing Emacs can do todetect the problem. Emacs checks the failure codes of all the systemcalls involved in writing a file, including `close'; but in the casewhere the problem occurs, none of those system calls fails.*** Editing files through RFS gives spurious "file has changed" warnings.It is possible that a change in Emacs 18.37 gets around this problem,but in case not, here is a description of how to fix the RFS bug thatcauses it. There was a serious pair of bugs in the handling of the fsync() system call in the RFS server. The first is that the fsync() call is handled as another name for the close() system call (!!). It appears that fsync() is not used by very many programs; Emacs version 18 does an fsync() before closing files to make sure that the bits are on the disk. This is fixed by the enclosed patch to the RFS server. The second, more serious problem, is that fsync() is treated as a non-blocking system call (i.e., it's implemented as a message that gets sent to the remote system without waiting for a reply). Fsync is a useful tool for building atomic file transactions. Implementing it as a non-blocking RPC call (when the local call blocks until the sync is done) is a bad idea; unfortunately, changing it will break the RFS protocol. No fix was supplied for this problem. (as always, your line numbers may vary) % rcsdiff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c RCS file: RCS/serversyscall.c,v retrieving revision 1.2 diff -c -r1.2 serversyscall.c *** /tmp/,RCSt1003677 Wed Jan 28 15:15:02 1987 --- serversyscall.c Wed Jan 28 15:14:48 1987 *************** *** 163,169 **** /* * No return sent for close or fsync! */ ! if (syscall == RSYS_close || syscall == RSYS_fsync) proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]); else { --- 166,172 ---- /* * No return sent for close or fsync! */ ! if (syscall == RSYS_close) proc->p_returnval = deallocate_fd(proc, msg->m_args[0]); else {** PSGML*** Old versions of the PSGML package use the obsolete variables`before-change-function' and `after-change-function', which are nolonger used by Emacs. Please use PSGML 1.2.3 or later.*** PSGML conflicts with sgml-mode.PSGML package uses the same names of some variables (like keymap)as built-in sgml-mode.el because it was created as a replacementof that package. The conflict will be shown if you loadsgml-mode.el before psgml.el. E.g. this could happen if you editHTML page and then start to work with SGML or XML file. html-mode(from sgml-mode.el) is used for HTML file and loading of psgml.el(for sgml-mode or xml-mode) will cause an error.*** Versions of the PSGML package earlier than 1.0.3 (stable) or 1.1.2(alpha) fail to parse DTD files correctly in Emacs 20.3 and later.Here is a patch for psgml-parse.el from PSGML 1.0.1 and, probably,earlier versions.--- psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:18:18 1.1+++ psgml-parse.el 1998/08/21 19:20:00@@ -2383,7 +2383,7 @@ (defun sgml-push-to-entity (entity &opti (setq sgml-buffer-parse-state nil)) (cond ((stringp entity) ; a file name- (save-excursion (insert-file-contents entity))+ (insert-file-contents entity) (setq default-directory (file-name-directory entity))) ((consp (sgml-entity-text entity)) ; external id? (let* ((extid (sgml-entity-text entity))** AUCTeXYou should not be using a version older than 11.52 if you can avoidit.*** Emacs 21 freezes when visiting a TeX file with AUCTeX installed.Emacs 21 needs version 10 or later of AUCTeX; upgrading should solvethese problems.*** No colors in AUCTeX with Emacs 21.Upgrade to AUC TeX version 10 or later, and make sure it isbyte-compiled with Emacs 21.** PCL-CVS*** Lines are not updated or new lines are added in the buffer upon commit.When committing files located higher in the hierarchy than the examineddirectory, some versions of the CVS program return an ambiguous messagefrom which PCL-CVS cannot extract the full location of the committedfiles. As a result, the corresponding lines in the PCL-CVS buffer arenot updated with the new revision of these files, and new lines areadded to the top-level directory.This can happen with CVS versions 1.12.8 and 1.12.9. Upgrade to CVS1.12.10 or newer to fix this problem.** Miscellaneous problems*** Self-documentation messages are garbled.This means that the file `etc/DOC-...' doesn't properly correspondwith the Emacs executable. Redumping Emacs and then installing thecorresponding pair of files should fix the problem.*** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs'terminal type.The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAPenvironment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable toprovide the information on the special terminal type that Emacsemulates.Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAPin such a case. You could use the following conditional which setsit only if it is undefined. if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-fileOr you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should nothappen in a non-login shell.*** In Shell mode, you get a ^M at the end of every line.This happens to people who use tcsh, because it is trying to be toosmart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turnson the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix theproblem by adding this to your .cshrc file: if ($?EMACS) then if ($EMACS == "t") then unset edit stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z endif endif*** Emacs startup on GNU/Linux systems (and possibly other systems) is slow.This can happen if the system is misconfigured and Emacs can't get thefull qualified domain name, FQDN. You should have your FQDN in the/etc/hosts file, something like this:127.0.0.1 localhost129.187.137.82 nuc04.t30.physik.tu-muenchen.de nuc04The way to set this up may vary on non-GNU systems.*** Attempting to visit remote files via ange-ftp fails.If the error message is "ange-ftp-file-modtime: Specified time is notrepresentable", then this could happen when `lukemftp' is used as theftp client. This was reported to happen on Debian GNU/Linux, kernelversion 2.4.3, with `lukemftp' 1.5-5, but might happen on othersystems as well. To avoid this problem, switch to using the standardftp client. On a Debian system, type update-alternatives --config ftpand then choose /usr/bin/netkit-ftp.*** JPEG images aren't displayed.This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem. Configure checks for thecorrect version, but this problem could occur if a binary builtagainst a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.*** Dired is very slow.This could happen if invocation of the `df' program takes a longtime. Possible reasons for this include: - ClearCase mounted filesystems (VOBs) that sometimes make `df' response time extremely slow (dozens of seconds); - slow automounters on some old versions of Unix; - slow operation of some versions of `df'.To work around the problem, you could either (a) set the variable`directory-free-space-program' to nil, and thus prevent Emacs frominvoking `df'; (b) use `df' from the GNU Fileutils package; or(c) use CVS, which is Free Software, instead of ClearCase.*** Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't rununder Emacs 21. This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.*** The LDAP support rely on ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 2.It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated. If you are still using it,please upgrade to version 2. As a temporary workaround, removeargument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.*** ps-print commands fail to find prologue files ps-prin*.ps.This can happen if you use an old version of X-Symbol package: itdefines compatibility functions which trick ps-print into thinking itruns in XEmacs, and look for the prologue files in a wrong directory.The solution is to upgrade X-Symbol to a later version.*** On systems with shared libraries you might encounter run-time errorsfrom the dynamic linker telling you that it is unable to find someshared libraries, for instance those for Xaw3d or image support.These errors mean Emacs has been linked with a library whose sharedlibrary is not in the default search path of the dynamic linker.Similar problems could prevent Emacs from building, since the buildprocess invokes Emacs several times.On many systems, it is possible to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in yourenvironment to specify additional directories where shared librariescan be found.Other systems allow to set LD_RUN_PATH in a similar way, but beforeEmacs is linked. With LD_RUN_PATH set, the linker will include aspecified run-time search path in the executable.On some systems, Emacs can crash due to problems with dynamiclinking. Specifically, on SGI Irix 6.5, crashes were reported withbacktraces like this: (dbx) where 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] 1 general_find_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":2140, 0xfb65a98] 2 resolve_symbol(0xf49239d, 0x4031184, 0x0, 0xfbdd438, 0x0, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":1947, 0xfb657e4] 3 lazy_text_resolve(0xd18, 0x1a3, 0x40302b4, 0x12, 0xf0000000, 0xf4923aa, 0x0, 0x492ddb2) ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld.c":997, 0xfb64d44] 4 _rld_text_resolve(0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0) ["/comp2/mtibuild/v73/workarea/v7.3/rld/rld_bridge.s":175, 0xfb6032c](`rld' is the dynamic linker.) We don't know yet why thishappens, but setting the environment variable LD_BIND_NOW to 1 (whichforces the dynamic linker to bind all shared objects early on) seemsto work around the problem.Please refer to the documentation of your dynamic linker for details.*** You request inverse video, and the first Emacs frame is in inversevideo, but later frames are not in inverse video.This can happen if you have an old version of the custom library inyour search path for Lisp packages. Use M-x list-load-path-shadows tocheck whether this is true. If it is, delete the old custom library.*** When you run Ispell from Emacs, it reports a "misalignment" error.This can happen if you compiled the Ispell program to use ASCIIcharacters only and then try to use it from Emacs with non-ASCIIcharacters, like Latin-1. The solution is to recompile Ispell withsupport for 8-bit characters.To see whether your Ispell program supports 8-bit characters, typethis at your shell's prompt: ispell -vvand look in the output for the string "NO8BIT". If Ispell says"!NO8BIT (8BIT)", your speller supports 8-bit characters; otherwise itdoes not.To rebuild Ispell with 8-bit character support, edit the local.h filein the Ispell distribution and make sure it does _not_ define NO8BIT.Then rebuild the speller.Another possible cause for "misalignment" error messages is that theversion of Ispell installed on your machine is old. Upgrade.Yet another possibility is that you are trying to spell-check a wordin a language that doesn't fit the dictionary you choose for use byIspell. (Ispell can only spell-check one language at a time, becauseit uses a single dictionary.) Make sure that the text you arespelling and the dictionary used by Ispell conform to each other.If your spell-checking program is Aspell, it has been reported that ifyou have a personal configuration file (normally ~/.aspell.conf), itcan cause this error. Remove that file, execute `ispell-kill-ispell'in Emacs, and then try spell-checking again.* Runtime problems related to font handling** Under X11, some characters appear as hollow boxes.Each X11 font covers just a fraction of the characters that Emacssupports. To display the whole range of Emacs characters requiresmany different fonts, collected into a fontset.If some of the fonts called for in your fontset do not exist on your Xserver, then the characters that have no font appear as hollow boxes.You can remedy the problem by installing additional fonts.The intlfonts distribution includes a full spectrum of fonts that candisplay all the characters Emacs supports.Another cause of this for specific characters is fonts which have amissing glyph and no default character. This is known to occur forcharacter number 160 (no-break space) in some fonts, such as Lucidabut Emacs sets the display table for the unibyte and Latin-1 versionof this character to display a space.** Under X11, some characters appear improperly aligned in their lines.You may have bad X11 fonts; try installing the intlfonts distribution.** Certain fonts make each line take one pixel more than it "should".This is because these fonts contain characters a little tallerthan the font's nominal height. Emacs needs to make sure thatlines do not overlap.** Loading fonts is very slow.You might be getting scalable fonts instead of precomputed bitmaps.Known scalable font directories are "Type1" and "Speedo". A fontdirectory contains scalable fonts if it contains the file"fonts.scale".If this is so, re-order your X windows font path to put the scalablefont directories last. See the documentation of `xset' for details.With some X servers, it may be necessary to take the scalable fontdirectories out of your path entirely, at least for Emacs 19.26.Changes in the future may make this unnecessary.** Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace`{' in column zero. Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside ofany comment or string. This is of course not true in general, but thevast majority of well-formatted program source files don't have suchparens, and therefore this assumption is used to allow optimizationsin Font Lock's syntactical analysis. These optimizations avoid somepathological cases where jit-lock, the Just-in-Time fontificationintroduced with Emacs 21.1, could significantly slow down scrollingthrough the buffer, especially scrolling backwards, and also jumpingto the end of a very large buffer.Beginning with version 22.1, a parenthesis or a brace in column zerois highlighted in bold-red face if it is inside a string or a comment,to indicate that it could interfere with Font Lock (and also withindentation) and should be moved or escaped with a backslash.If you don't use large buffers, or have a very fast machine whichmakes the delays insignificant, you can avoid the incorrectfontification by setting the variable`font-lock-beginning-of-syntax-function' to a nil value. (This mustbe done _after_ turning on Font Lock.)Another alternative is to avoid a paren in column zero. For example,in a Lisp string you could precede the paren with a backslash.** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, thecharacter doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead.One user on a Linux-based GNU system reported that this problem wentaway with installation of a new X server. The failing server wasXFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works.** Characters are displayed as empty boxes or with wrong font under X.This can occur when two different versions of FontConfig are used.For example, XFree86 4.3.0 has one version and Gnome usually comeswith a newer version. Emacs compiled with --with-gtk will then usethe newer version. In most cases the problem can be temporarilyfixed by stopping the application that has the error (it can beEmacs or any other application), removing ~/.fonts.cache-1,and then start the application again.If removing ~/.fonts.cache-1 and restarting doesn't help, theapplication with problem must be recompiled with the same versionof FontConfig as the rest of the system uses. For KDE, it issufficient to recompile Qt.** Emacs pauses for several seconds when changing the default font.This has been reported for fvwm 2.2.5 and the window manager of KDE2.1. The reason for the pause is Xt waiting for a ConfigureNotifyevent from the window manager, which the window manager doesn't send.Xt stops waiting after a default timeout of usually 5 seconds.A workaround for this is to add something likeemacs.waitForWM: falseto your X resources. Alternatively, add `(wait-for-wm . nil)' to aframe's parameter list, like this: (modify-frame-parameters nil '((wait-for-wm . nil)))(this should go into your `.emacs' file).** Underlines appear at the wrong position.This is caused by fonts having a wrong UNDERLINE_POSITION property.Examples are the font 7x13 on XFree prior to version 4.1, or the jmkneep font from the Debian xfonts-jmk package. To circumvent thisproblem, set x-use-underline-position-properties to nil in your`.emacs'.To see what is the value of UNDERLINE_POSITION defined by the font,type `xlsfonts -lll FONT' and look at the font's UNDERLINE_POSITIONproperty.** When using Exceed, fonts sometimes appear too tall.When the display is set to an Exceed X-server and fonts are specified(either explicitly with the -fn option or implicitly with X resources)then the fonts may appear "too tall". The actual character sizes arecorrect but there is too much vertical spacing between rows, whichgives the appearance of "double spacing".To prevent this, turn off the Exceed's "automatic font substitution"feature (in the font part of the configuration window).* Internationalization problems** Characters from the mule-unicode charsets aren't displayed under X.XFree86 4 contains many fonts in iso10646-1 encoding which haveminimal character repertoires (whereas the encoding part of the fontname is meant to be a reasonable indication of the repertoireaccording to the XLFD spec). Emacs may choose one of these to displaycharacters from the mule-unicode charsets and then typically won't beable to find the glyphs to display many characters. (Check with C-uC-x = .) To avoid this, you may need to use a fontset which sets thefont for the mule-unicode sets explicitly. E.g. to use GNU unifont,include in the fontset spec:mule-unicode-2500-33ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\mule-unicode-e000-ffff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1,\mule-unicode-0100-24ff:-gnu-unifont-*-iso10646-1** The UTF-8/16/7 coding systems don't encode CJK (Far Eastern) characters.Emacs directly supports the Unicode BMP whose code points are in theranges 0000-33ff and e000-ffff, and indirectly supports the parts ofCJK characters belonging to these legacy charsets: GB2312, Big5, JISX0208, JISX0212, JISX0213-1, JISX0213-2, KSC5601The latter support is done in Utf-Translate-Cjk mode (turned on bydefault). Which Unicode CJK characters are decoded into which Emacscharset is decided by the current language environment. For instance,in Chinese-GB, most of them are decoded into chinese-gb2312.If you read UTF-8 data with code points outside these ranges, thecharacters appear in the buffer as raw bytes of the original UTF-8(composed into a single quasi-character) and they will be written backcorrectly as UTF-8, assuming you don't break the composed sequences.If you read such characters from UTF-16 or UTF-7 data, they aresubstituted with the Unicode `replacement character', and you loseinformation.** Mule-UCS loads very slowly.Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS. Apply thefollowing patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it. That will help,though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20. (Somedistributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)--- lisp/un-define.el 6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000 1.30+++ lisp/un-define.el 19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000@@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre- (mapcar (lambda (x)- (mapcar- (lambda (y)- (mucs-define-coding-system- (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)- (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))- (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))- (cdr x)))+ (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)+ ;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and+ ;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding+ ;; system definitions.+ (let ((y (cadr x)))+ (mucs-define-coding-system+ (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)+ (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))+ (mapcar+ (lambda (y)+ (mucs-define-coding-system+ (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)+ (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))+ (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))+ (cdr x))) `((utf-8 (utf-8-unix ?u "UTF-8 coding system"Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent toMule-UCS's, so you may not need it.** Mule-UCS compilation problem.Emacs of old versions and XEmacs byte-compile the form `(progn progn...)' the same way as `(progn ...)', but Emacs of version 21.3 and thelater process that form just as interpreter does, that is, as `progn'variable reference. Apply the following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 tomake it compiled by the latest Emacs.--- mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 00:42:23 -0000 1.1.1.1+++ mucs-ccl.el 2 Sep 2005 01:31:51 -0000 1.3@@ -639,10 +639,14 @@ (mucs-notify-embedment 'mucs-ccl-required name) (setq ccl-pgm-list (cdr ccl-pgm-list))) ; (message "MCCLREGFIN:%S" result)- `(progn- (setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist- (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))- ,@result)))+ ;; The only way the function is used in this package is included+ ;; in `mucs-package-definition-end-hook' value, where it must+ ;; return (possibly empty) *list* of forms. Do this. Do not rely+ ;; on byte compiler to remove extra `progn's in `(progn ...)' + ;; form.+ `((setq mucs-ccl-facility-alist+ (quote ,mucs-ccl-facility-alist))+ ,@result))) ;;; Add hook for embedding translation informations to a package. (add-hook 'mucs-package-definition-end-hook** Accented ISO-8859-1 characters are displayed as | or _.Try other font set sizes (S-mouse-1). If the problem persists withother sizes as well, your text is corrupted, probably through softwarethat is not 8-bit clean. If the problem goes away with another fontsize, it's probably because some fonts pretend to be ISO-8859-1 fontswhen they are really ASCII fonts. In particular the schumacher-cleanfonts have this bug in some versions of X.To see what glyphs are included in a font, use `xfd', like this: xfd -fn -schumacher-clean-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-c-60-iso8859-1If this shows only ASCII glyphs, the font is indeed the source of theproblem.The solution is to remove the corresponding lines from the appropriate`fonts.alias' file, then run `mkfontdir' in that directory, and then run`xset fp rehash'.** The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.This package tries to define more private charsets than there are freeslots now. The current built-in Unicode support is actually moreflexible. (Use option `utf-translate-cjk-mode' if you need CJKsupport.) Files encoded as emacs-mule using oc-unicode aren'tgenerally read correctly by Emacs 21.** After a while, Emacs slips into unibyte mode.The VM mail package, which is not part of Emacs, sometimes does (standard-display-european t)That should be changed to (standard-display-european 1 t)* X runtime problems** X keyboard problems*** You "lose characters" after typing Compose Character key.This is because the Compose Character key is defined as the keysymMulti_key, and Emacs (seeing that) does the proper X11character-composition processing. If you don't want your Compose keyto do that, you can redefine it with xmodmap.For example, here's one way to turn it into a Meta key: xmodmap -e "keysym Multi_key = Meta_L"If all users at your site of a particular keyboard prefer Meta toCompose, you can make the remapping happen automatically by adding thexmodmap command to the xdm setup script for that display.*** Using X Windows, control-shift-leftbutton makes Emacs hang.Use the shell command `xset bc' to make the old X Menu package work.*** C-SPC fails to work on Fedora GNU/Linux (or with fcitx input method).Fedora Core 4 steals the C-SPC key by default for the `iiimx' programwhich is the input method for some languages. It blocks Emacs usersfrom using the C-SPC key for `set-mark-command'.One solutions is to remove the `<Ctrl>space' from the `Iiimx' filewhich can be found in the `/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults' directory.However, that requires root access.Another is to specify `Emacs*useXIM: false' in your X resources.Another is to build Emacs with the `--without-xim' configure option.The same problem happens on any other system if you are using fcitx(Chinese input method) which by default use C-SPC for toggling. Ifyou want to use fcitx with Emacs, you have two choices. Toggle fcitxby another key (e.g. C-\) by modifying ~/.fcitx/config, or beaccustomed to use C-@ for `set-mark-command'.*** M-SPC seems to be ignored as input.See if your X server is set up to use this as a commandfor character composition.*** The S-C-t key combination doesn't get passed to Emacs on X.This happens because some X configurations assign the Ctrl-Shift-tcombination the same meaning as the Multi_key. The offendingdefinition is in the file `...lib/X11/locale/iso8859-1/Compose'; theremight be other similar combinations which are grabbed by X for similarpurposes.We think that this can be countermanded with the `xmodmap' utility, ifyou want to be able to bind one of these key sequences within Emacs.*** Under X, C-v and/or other keys don't work.These may have been intercepted by your window manager. Inparticular, AfterStep 1.6 is reported to steal C-v in its defaultconfiguration. Various Meta keys are also likely to be taken by theconfiguration of the `feel'. See the WM's documentation for how tochange this.*** Clicking C-mouse-2 in the scroll bar doesn't split the window.This currently doesn't work with scroll-bar widgets (and we don't knowa good way of implementing it with widgets). If Emacs is configured--without-toolkit-scroll-bars, C-mouse-2 on the scroll bar does work.*** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicatingdirectly with an X server.If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and itdoes not work to type the command, the first thing you should check iswhether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h cfollowed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of eventit read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure youhave made the key binding correctly.If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it maybe because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The Xserver that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier bydefault.If your keyboard has keys named Alt, you can enable them as follows: xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_L' xmodmap -e 'add mod2 = Alt_R'If the keyboard has just one key named Alt, then only one of thosecommands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if youare using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose anymodifier bit not otherwise used.If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some otherkeys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (orsome other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use thecommands show above to make them modifier keys.Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Altinto Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs.** Window-manager and toolkit-related problems*** Gnome: Emacs' xterm-mouse-mode doesn't work on the Gnome terminal.A symptom of this bug is that double-clicks insert a control sequenceinto the buffer. The reason this happens is an apparentincompatibility of the Gnome terminal with Xterm, which also affectsother programs using the Xterm mouse interface. A problem report hasbeen filed.*** KDE: When running on KDE, colors or fonts are not as specified for Emacs,or messed up.For example, you could see background you set for Emacs only in theempty portions of the Emacs display, while characters have some otherbackground.This happens because KDE's defaults apply its color and fontdefinitions even to applications that weren't compiled for KDE. Thesolution is to uncheck the "Apply fonts and colors to non-KDE apps"option in Preferences->Look&Feel->Style (KDE 2). In KDE 3, this optionis in the "Colors" section, rather than "Style".Alternatively, if you do want the KDE defaults to apply to otherapplications, but not to Emacs, you could modify the file `Emacs.ad'(should be in the `/usr/share/apps/kdisplay/app-defaults/' directory)so that it doesn't set the default background and foreground only forEmacs. For example, make sure the following resources are either notpresent or commented out: Emacs.default.attributeForeground Emacs.default.attributeBackground Emacs*Foreground Emacs*Background*** KDE: Emacs hangs on KDE when a large portion of text is killed.This is caused by a bug in the KDE applet `klipper' which periodicallyrequests the X clipboard contents from applications. Early versionsof klipper don't implement the ICCCM protocol for large selections,which leads to Emacs being flooded with selection requests. After awhile, Emacs may print a message: Timed out waiting for property-notify eventA workaround is to not use `klipper'. An upgrade to the `klipper' thatcomes with KDE 3.3 or later also solves the problem.*** CDE: Frames may cover dialogs they created when using CDE.This can happen if you have "Allow Primary Windows On Top" enabled whichseems to be the default in the Common Desktop Environment.To change, go in to "Desktop Controls" -> "Window Style Manager"and uncheck "Allow Primary Windows On Top".*** Xaw3d : When using Xaw3d scroll bars without arrows, the very first mouseclick in a scroll bar might be ignored by the scroll bar widget. Thisis probably a bug in Xaw3d; when Xaw3d is compiled with arrows, theproblem disappears.*** Xaw: There are known binary incompatibilities between Xaw, Xaw3d, neXtaw,XawM and the few other derivatives of Xaw. So when you compile withone of these, it may not work to dynamically link with another one.For example, strange problems, such as Emacs exiting when you type"C-x 1", were reported when Emacs compiled with Xaw3d and libXaw wasused with neXtaw at run time.The solution is to rebuild Emacs with the toolkit version you actuallywant to use, or set LD_PRELOAD to preload the same toolkit version youbuilt Emacs with.*** Open Motif: Problems with file dialogs in Emacs built with Open Motif.When Emacs 21 is built with Open Motif 2.1, it can happen that thegraphical file dialog boxes do not work properly. The "OK", "Filter"and "Cancel" buttons do not respond to mouse clicks. Dragging thefile dialog window usually causes the buttons to work again.The solution is to use LessTif instead. LessTif is a free replacementfor Motif. See the file INSTALL for information on how to do this.Another workaround is not to use the mouse to trigger file prompts,but to use the keyboard. This way, you will be prompted for a file inthe minibuffer instead of a graphical file dialog.*** LessTif: Problems in Emacs built with LessTif.The problems seem to depend on the version of LessTif and the Motifemulation for which it is set up.Only the Motif 1.2 emulation seems to be stable enough in LessTif.Lesstif 0.92-17's Motif 1.2 emulation seems to work okay on FreeBSD.On GNU/Linux systems, lesstif-0.92.6 configured with "./configure--enable-build-12 --enable-default-12" is reported to be the mostsuccessful. The binary GNU/Linux packagelesstif-devel-0.92.0-1.i386.rpm was reported to have problems withmenu placement.On some systems, even with Motif 1.2 emulation, Emacs occasionallylocks up, grabbing all mouse and keyboard events. We still don't knowwhat causes these problems; they are not reproducible by Emacsdevelopers.*** Motif: The Motif version of Emacs paints the screen a solid color.This has been observed to result from the following X resource: Emacs*default.attributeFont: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-140-*-*-*-*-iso8859-*That the resource has this effect indicates a bug in something, but wedo not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone canexplain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removingthe resource prevents the problem.** General X problems*** Redisplay using X11 is much slower than previous Emacs versions.We've noticed that certain X servers draw the text much slower whenscroll bars are on the left. We don't know why this happens. If thishappens to you, you can work around it by putting the scroll barson the right (as they were in Emacs 19).Here's how to do this: (set-scroll-bar-mode 'right)If you're not sure whether (or how much) this problem affects you,try that and see how much difference it makes. To set things backto normal, do (set-scroll-bar-mode 'left)*** Error messages about undefined colors on X.The messages might say something like this: Unable to load color "grey95"(typically, in the `*Messages*' buffer), or something like this: Error while displaying tooltip: (error Undefined color lightyellow)These problems could happen if some other X program has used up toomany colors of the X palette, leaving Emacs with insufficient systemresources to load all the colors it needs.A solution is to exit the offending X programs before starting Emacs."undefined color" messages can also occur if the RgbPath entry in theX configuration file is incorrect, or the rgb.txt file is not whereX expects to find it.*** Improving performance with slow X connections.There are several ways to improve this performance, any subset of which canbe carried out at the same time:1) If you don't need X Input Methods (XIM) for entering text in some language you use, you can improve performance on WAN links by using the X resource useXIM to turn off use of XIM. This does not affect the use of Emacs' own input methods, which are part of the Leim package.2) If the connection is very slow, you might also want to consider switching off scroll bars, menu bar, and tool bar.3) Use ssh to forward the X connection, and enable compression on this forwarded X connection (ssh -XC remotehostname emacs ...).4) Use lbxproxy on the remote end of the connection. This is an interface to the low bandwidth X extension in most modern X servers, which improves performance dramatically, at the slight expense of correctness of the X protocol. lbxproxy acheives the performance gain by grouping several X requests in one TCP packet and sending them off together, instead of requiring a round-trip for each X request in a seperate packet. The switches that seem to work best for emacs are: -noatomsfile -nowinattr -cheaterrors -cheatevents Note that the -nograbcmap option is known to cause problems. For more about lbxproxy, see: http://www.xfree86.org/4.3.0/lbxproxy.1.html*** Emacs gives the error, Couldn't find per display information.This can result if the X server runs out of memory because Emacs usesa large number of fonts. On systems where this happens, C-h h islikely to cause it.We do not know of a way to prevent the problem.*** Emacs does not notice when you release the mouse.There are reports that this happened with (some) Microsoft mice andthat replacing the mouse made it stop.*** You can't select from submenus (in the X toolkit version).On certain systems, mouse-tracking and selection in top-level menusworks properly with the X toolkit, but neither of them works when youbring up a submenu (such as Bookmarks or Compare or Apply Patch, inthe Files menu).This works on most systems. There is speculation that the failure isdue to bugs in old versions of X toolkit libraries, but no one reallyknows. If someone debugs this and finds the precise cause, perhaps aworkaround can be found.*** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalidparameter attributes) on protocol request 93'.This comes from having an invalid X resource, such as emacs*Cursor: black(which is invalid because it specifies a color name for somethingthat isn't a color.)The fix is to correct your X resources.*** Slow startup on X11R6 with X windows.If Emacs takes two minutes to start up on X11R6, see if your Xresources specify any Adobe fonts. That causes the type-1 fontrenderer to start up, even if the font you asked for is not a type-1font.One way to avoid this problem is to eliminate the type-1 fonts fromyour font path, like this: xset -fp /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/*** Pull-down menus appear in the wrong place, in the toolkit version of Emacs.An X resource of this form can cause the problem: Emacs*geometry: 80x55+0+0This resource is supposed to apply, and does apply, to the menusindividually as well as to Emacs frames. If that is not what youwant, rewrite the resource.To check thoroughly for such resource specifications, use `xrdb-query' to see what resources the X server records, and also look atthe user's ~/.Xdefaults and ~/.Xdefaults-* files.*** Emacs running under X Windows does not handle mouse clicks.*** `emacs -geometry 80x20' finds a file named `80x20'.One cause of such problems is having (setq term-file-prefix nil) inyour .emacs file. Another cause is a bad value of EMACSLOADPATH inthe environment.*** Emacs fails to get default settings from X Windows server.The X library in X11R4 has a bug; it interchanges the 2nd and 3rdarguments to XGetDefaults. Define the macro XBACKWARDS in config.h totell Emacs to compensate for this.I don't believe there is any way Emacs can determine for itselfwhether this problem is present on a given system.*** X Windows doesn't work if DISPLAY uses a hostname.People have reported kernel bugs in certain systems that cause Emacsnot to work with X Windows if DISPLAY is set using a host name. Butthe problem does not occur if DISPLAY is set to `unix:0.0'. I thinkthe bug has to do with SIGIO or FIONREAD.You may be able to compensate for the bug by doing (set-input-mode nil nil).However, that has the disadvantage of turning off interrupts, so thatyou are unable to quit out of a Lisp program by typing C-g.The easy way to do this is to put (setq x-sigio-bug t)in your site-init.el file.* Runtime problems on character termunals** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen.This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is beingused. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takesaway C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output longstreams of text without user commands, there is no need for auser-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, aproperly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possibleinput characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism iseasy, for a person with at least half a brain.There are three possible reasons why flow control could be taking place: 1) Terminal has not been told to disable flow control 2) Insufficient padding for the terminal in use 3) Some sort of terminal concentrator or line switch is responsibleFirst of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whetherthey generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to"no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is anescape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control offand on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flowcontrol off, and the `te' string should turn it on.Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find itneeds more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlledby the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baudrate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will printyour output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it ifit is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. Ifthe results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably aproblem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizardto fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type.For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes justgiving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow controlcodes. You might as well try it.If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computerthrough a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to thecomputer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter howmuch padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flowcontrol off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard),you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentratorreplaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drasticmeasures can make Emacs semi-work.You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating systemhandle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-xenable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ arenow translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-xenable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flowcontrol handling.)If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of themis the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can chooseother characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacementand flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since allother control characters are already used by emacs.IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled,Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q inorder to continue.If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of acertain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function`enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance schemeautomatically. Here is an example:(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbledand good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-controlmanually.I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for theassumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flowcontrol technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are badmerchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becomingwidespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get someuse out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but Iwill not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sakeof inferior systems.** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely.For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flowcontrol despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps yourterminal is connected to the computer through a concentratorthat wants to use flow control.You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control.If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work withoutflow control, as described in the preceding section.If that line of approach is not successful, map some other charactersinto C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example aboveshows how to do this with C-^ and C-\.** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal.This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for thatterminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handingthe combination of features specified for that terminal.The first step in tracking this down is to record what charactersEmacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression(open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write allterminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then dowhat makes the screen update wrong, and look at the fileand decode the characters using the manual for the terminal.There are several possibilities:1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual.In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely youneed more padding, or possibly the terminal manual is wrong.2) The characters sent are incorrect, due to an obscure aspect of the terminal behavior not described in an obvious way by termcap.This case is hard. It will be necessary to think of a way forEmacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behaviorand other terminals that behave subtly differently but areclassified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm forEmacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must betested on many kinds of terminals.3) The termcap entry is wrong.See the file etc/TERMS for information on changesthat are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entriesfor certain terminals.4) The characters sent are incorrect, and clearly cannot be right for any terminal with the termcap entry you were using.This is unambiguously an Emacs bug, and can probably be fixedin termcap.c, tparam.c, term.c, scroll.c, cm.c or dispnew.c.** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection.Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flowcontrol characters to the remote system to which they connect.On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flowcontrol on the local system.One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host(the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using thestty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems,"stty start u stop u" will do this.Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One wayaround this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, andissue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell.If none of these methods work, the best solution is to typeM-x enable-flow-control at the beginning of your emacs session, orif you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as thefollowing to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind):(enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131")See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for moreinfo.** Output from Control-V is slow.On many bit-map terminals, scrolling operations are fairly slow.Often the termcap entry for the type of terminal in use failsto inform Emacs of this. The two lines at the bottom of the screenbefore a Control-V command are supposed to appear at the top afterthe Control-V command. If Emacs thinks scrolling the lines is fast,it will scroll them to the top of the screen.If scrolling is slow but Emacs thinks it is fast, the usual reason isthat the termcap entry for the terminal you are using does notspecify any padding time for the `al' and `dl' strings. Emacsconcludes that these operations take only as much time as it takes tosend the commands at whatever line speed you are using. You mustfix the termcap entry to specify, for the `al' and `dl', as muchtime as the operations really take.Currently Emacs thinks in terms of serial lines which send charactersat a fixed rate, so that any operation which takes time for theterminal to execute must also be padded. With bit-map terminalsoperated across networks, often the network provides some sort offlow control so that padding is never needed no matter how slowan operation is. You must still specify a padding time if you wantEmacs to realize that the operation takes a long time. This willcause padding characters to be sent unnecessarily, but they donot really cost much. They will be transmitted while the scrollingis happening and then discarded quickly by the terminal.Most bit-map terminals provide commands for inserting or deletingmultiple lines at once. Define the `AL' and `DL' strings in thetermcap entry to say how to do these things, and you will havefast output without wasted padding characters. These strings shouldeach contain a single %-spec saying how to send the number of linesto be scrolled. These %-specs are like those in the termcap`cm' string.You should also define the `IC' and `DC' strings if your terminalhas a command to insert or delete multiple characters. Thesetake the number of positions to insert or delete as an argument.A `cs' string to set the scrolling region will reduce the amountof motion you see on the screen when part of the screen is scrolled.** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters.Put `stty dec' in your .login file and your problems will disappearafter a day or two.The choice of Backspace for erasure was based on confusion, caused bythe fact that backspacing causes erasure (later, when you type anothercharacter) on most display terminals. But it is a mistake. Deletionof text is not the same thing as backspacing followed by failure tooverprint. I do not wish to propagate this confusion by conformingto it.For this reason, I believe `stty dec' is the right mode to use,and I have designed Emacs to go with that. If there were a thousandother control characters, I would define Control-h to delete as well;but there are not very many other control characters, and I thinkthat providing the most mnemonic possible Help character is moreimportant than adapting to people who don't use `stty dec'.If you are obstinate about confusing buggy overprinting with deletion,you can redefine Backspace in your .emacs file: (global-set-key "\b" 'delete-backward-char)You can probably access help-command via f1.** Colors are not available on a tty or in xterm.Emacs 21 supports colors on character terminals and terminalemulators, but this support relies on the terminfo or termcap databaseentry to specify that the display supports color. Emacs looks at the"Co" capability for the terminal to find out how many colors aresupported; it should be non-zero to activate the color support withinEmacs. (Most color terminals support 8 or 16 colors.) If your systemuses terminfo, the name of the capability equivalent to "Co" is"colors".In addition to the "Co" capability, Emacs needs the "op" (for``original pair'') capability, which tells how to switch the terminalback to the default foreground and background colors. Emacs will notuse colors if this capability is not defined. If your terminal entrydoesn't provide such a capability, try using the ANSI standard escapesequence \E[00m (that is, define a new termcap/terminfo entry and makeit use your current terminal's entry plus \E[00m for the "op"capability).Finally, the "NC" capability (terminfo name: "ncv") tells Emacs whichattributes cannot be used with colors. Setting this capabilityincorrectly might have the effect of disabling colors; try settingthis capability to `0' (zero) and see if that helps.Emacs uses the database entry for the terminal whose name is the valueof the environment variable TERM. With `xterm', a common terminalentry that supports color is `xterm-color', so setting TERM's value to`xterm-color' might activate the color support on an xterm-compatibleemulator.Beginning with version 22.1, Emacs supports the --color command-lineoption which may be used to force Emacs to use one of a few popularmodes for getting colors on a tty. For example, --color=ansi8 sets upfor using the ANSI-standard escape sequences that support 8 colors.Some modes do not use colors unless you turn on the Font-lock mode.Some people have long ago set their `~/.emacs' files to turn onFont-lock on X only, so they won't see colors on a tty. Therecommended way of turning on Font-lock is by typing "M-xglobal-font-lock-mode RET" or by customizing the variable`global-font-lock-mode'.* Runtime problems specific to individual Unix variants** GNU/Linux*** GNU/Linux: Process output is corrupted.There is a bug in Linux kernel 2.6.10 PTYs that can cause emacs toread corrupted process output.*** GNU/Linux: Remote access to CVS with SSH causes file corruption.If you access a remote CVS repository via SSH, files may be corrupteddue to bad interaction between CVS, SSH, and libc.To fix the problem, save the following script into a file, make itexecutable, and set CVS_RSH environment variable to the file name ofthe script:#!/bin/bashexec 2> >(exec cat >&2 2>/dev/null)exec ssh "$@"*** GNU/Linux: On Linux-based GNU systems using libc versions 5.4.19 through5.4.22, Emacs crashes at startup with a segmentation fault.This problem happens if libc defines the symbol __malloc_initialized.One known solution is to upgrade to a newer libc version. 5.4.33 isknown to work.*** GNU/Linux: After upgrading to a newer version of Emacs,the Meta key stops working.This was reported to happen on a GNU/Linux system distributed byMandrake. The reason is that the previous version of Emacs wasmodified by Mandrake to make the Alt key act as the Meta key, on akeyboard where the Windows key is the one which produces the Metamodifier. A user who started using a newer version of Emacs, whichwas not hacked by Mandrake, expected the Alt key to continue to act asMeta, and was astonished when that didn't happen.The solution is to find out what key on your keyboard produces the Metamodifier, and use that key instead. Try all of the keys to the leftand to the right of the space bar, together with the `x' key, and seewhich combination produces "M-x" in the echo area. You can also usethe `xmodmap' utility to show all the keys which produce a Metamodifier: xmodmap -pk | egrep -i "meta|alt"A more convenient way of finding out which keys produce a Meta modifieris to use the `xkbprint' utility, if it's available on your system: xkbprint 0:0 /tmp/k.psThis produces a PostScript file `/tmp/k.ps' with a picture of yourkeyboard; printing that file on a PostScript printer will show whatkeys can serve as Meta.The `xkeycaps' also shows a visual representation of the currentkeyboard settings. It also allows to modify them.*** GNU/Linux: low startup on Linux-based GNU systems.People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report thatstartup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'.This is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts.Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due toimproper system configuration. This problem can occur for bothnetworked and non-networked machines.Here is how to fix the configuration. It requires being root.**** Networked Case.First, make sure the files `/etc/hosts' and `/etc/host.conf' bothexist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this(replace HOSTNAME with your host name): 127.0.0.1 HOSTNAMEAlso make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the followinglines: order hosts, bind multi onAny changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should beindicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited localdatabase of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connectionsdynamically allocate ip addresses).**** Non-Networked Case.The solution described in the networked case applies here as well.However, if you never intend to network your machine, you can use asimpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command`touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts'file is not necessary with this approach.*** GNU/Linux: Emacs on a tty switches the cursor to large blinking block.This was reported to happen on some GNU/Linux systems which usencurses version 5.0, but could be relevant for other versions as well.These versions of ncurses come with a `linux' terminfo entry, wherethe "cvvis" capability (termcap "vs") is defined as "\E[?25h\E[?8c"(show cursor, change size). This escape sequence switches on ablinking hardware text-mode cursor whose size is a full charactercell. This blinking cannot be stopped, since a hardware cursoralways blinks.A work-around is to redefine the "cvvis" capability so that itenables a *software* cursor. The software cursor works by invertingthe colors of the character at point, so what you see is a blockcursor that doesn't blink. For this to work, you need to redefinethe "cnorm" capability as well, so that it operates on the softwarecursor instead of the hardware cursor.To this end, run "infocmp linux > linux-term", edit the file`linux-term' to make both the "cnorm" and "cvvis" capabilities sendthe sequence "\E[?25h\E[?17;0;64c", and then run "tic linux-term" toproduce a modified terminfo entry.Alternatively, if you want a blinking underscore as your Emacs cursor,change the "cvvis" capability to send the "\E[?25h\E[?0c" command.*** GNU/Linux: Error messages `internal facep []' happen on GNU/Linux systems.There is a report that replacing libc.so.5.0.9 with libc.so.5.2.16caused this to start happening. People are not sure why, but theproblem seems unlikely to be in Emacs itself. Some suspect that itis actually Xlib which won't work with libc.so.5.2.16.Using the old library version is a workaround.** Mac OS X*** Mac OS X (Carbon): Environment Variables from dotfiles are ignored.When starting Emacs from the Dock or the Finder on Mac OS X, theenvironment variables that are set up in dotfiles, such as .cshrc or.profile, are ignored. This is because the Finder and Dock are notstarted from a shell, but instead from the Window Manager itself.The workaround for this is to create a .MacOSX/environment.plist file tosetup these environment variables. These environment variables willapply to all processes regardless of where they are started.For me information, see http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1067.html.*** Mac OS X (Carbon): Process output truncated when using ptys.There appears to be a problem with the implementation of pty's on theMac OS X that causes process output to be truncated. To avoid this,leave process-connection-type set to its default value of nil.*** Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Carbon): QuickTime 7.0.4 updater breaks build.On the above environment, build fails at the link stage with themessage like "Undefined symbols: _HICopyAccessibilityActionDescriptionreferenced from QuickTime expected to be defined in Carbon". Aworkaround is to use QuickTime 7.0.1 reinstaller.** FreeBSD*** FreeBSD 2.1.5: useless symbolic links remain in /tmp or otherdirectories that have the +t bit.This is because of a kernel bug in FreeBSD 2.1.5 (fixed in 2.2).Emacs uses symbolic links to implement file locks. In a directorywith +t bit, the directory owner becomes the owner of the symboliclink, so that it cannot be removed by anyone else.If you don't like those useless links, you can let Emacs not to usingfile lock by adding #undef CLASH_DETECTION to config.h.*** FreeBSD: Getting a Meta key on the console.By default, neither Alt nor any other key acts as a Meta key onFreeBSD, but this can be changed using kbdcontrol(1). Dump thecurrent keymap to a file with the command $ kbdcontrol -d >emacs.kbdEdit emacs.kbd, and give the key you want to be the Meta key thedefinition `meta'. For instance, if your keyboard has a ``Windows''key with scan code 105, change the line for scan code 105 in emacs.kbdto look like this 105 meta meta meta meta meta meta meta meta Oto make the Windows key the Meta key. Load the new keymap with $ kbdcontrol -l emacs.kbd** HP-UX*** HP/UX : Shell mode gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous".christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says:The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries toexecute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty thentty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places,but tty is giving it back 3.The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a singleword:if (`tty` == "/dev/console")should be changed to:if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console")Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrcand into .login.*** HP/UX: `Pid xxx killed due to text modification or page I/O error'.On HP/UX, you can get that error when the Emacs executable is on an NFSfile system. HP/UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page anddoes not get a response from the server within a timeout whose defaultvalue is just ten seconds.If this happens to you, extend the timeout period.*** HP/UX: The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhapsother non-English HP keyboards too).This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is ashell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUEconfigures the X server. xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOF keysym Alt_L = Meta_L keysym Alt_R = Meta_R EOF xmodmap - << EOF clear mod1 keysym Mode_switch = NoSymbol add mod1 = Meta_L keysym Meta_R = Mode_switch add mod2 = Mode_switch EOF*** HP/UX: "Cannot find callback list" messages from dialog boxes inEmacs built with Motif.This problem resulted from a bug in GCC 2.4.5. Newer GCC versionssuch as 2.7.0 fix the problem.*** HP/UX: Emacs does not recognize the AltGr key.To fix this, set up a file ~/.dt/sessions/sessionetc with executablerights, containing this text:--------------------------------xmodmap 2> /dev/null - << EOFkeysym Alt_L = Meta_Lkeysym Alt_R = Meta_REOFxmodmap - << EOFclear mod1keysym Mode_switch = NoSymboladd mod1 = Meta_Lkeysym Meta_R = Mode_switchadd mod2 = Mode_switchEOF--------------------------------*** HP/UX 11.0: Emacs makes HP/UX 11.0 crash.This is a bug in HPUX; HPUX patch PHKL_16260 is said to fix it.** AIX*** AIX: Trouble using ptys.People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly.Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly.*** AIXterm: Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal.The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines: *aixterm.Translations: #override <Key>BackSpace: string(0x7f) aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^?This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127).*** AIX: If linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if youare compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'. Ifso, you have hit a compiler bug. Please make sure to re-configureEmacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.*** AIX 4.3.x or 4.4: Compiling fails.This could happen if you use /bin/c89 as your compiler, instead ofthe default `cc'. /bin/c89 treats certain warnings, such as benignredefinitions of macros, as errors, and fails the build. A solutionis to use the default compiler `cc'.*** AIX 4: Some programs fail when run in a Shell bufferwith an error message like No terminfo entry for "unknown".On AIX, many terminal type definitions are not installed by default.`unknown' is one of them. Install the "Special Generic TerminalDefinitions" to make them defined.** SolarisWe list bugs in current versions here. Solaris 2.x and 4.x are covered in thesection on legacy systems.*** On Solaris, C-x doesn't get through to Emacs when you use the console.This is a Solaris feature (at least on Intel x86 cpus). Type C-rC-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs.*** Problem with remote X server on Suns.On a Sun, running Emacs on one machine with the X server on anothermay not work if you have used the unshared system libraries. Thisis because the unshared libraries fail to use YP for host name lookup.As a result, the host name you specify may not be recognized.*** Solaris 2,6: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV on Solaris after you delete a frame.We suspect that this is a bug in the X libraries provided bySun. There is a report that one of these patches fixes the bug andmakes the problem stop:105216-01 105393-01 105518-01 105621-01 105665-01 105615-02 105216-02105667-01 105401-08 105615-03 105621-02 105686-02 105736-01 105755-03106033-01 105379-01 105786-01 105181-04 105379-03 105786-04 105845-01105284-05 105669-02 105837-01 105837-02 105558-01 106125-02 105407-01Another person using a newer system (kernel patch level Generic_105181-06)suspects that the bug was fixed by one of these more recent patches:106040-07 SunOS 5.6: X Input & Output Method patch106222-01 OpenWindows 3.6: filemgr (ff.core) fixes105284-12 Motif 1.2.7: sparc Runtime library patch*** Solaris 7 or 8: Emacs reports a BadAtom error (from X)This happens when Emacs was built on some other version of Solaris.Rebuild it on Solaris 8.*** When using M-x dbx with the SparcWorks debugger, the `up' and `down'commands do not move the arrow in Emacs.You can fix this by adding the following line to `~/.dbxinit': dbxenv output_short_file_name off*** On Solaris, CTRL-t is ignored by Emacs when you usethe fr.ISO-8859-15 locale (and maybe other related locales).You can fix this by editing the file: /usr/openwin/lib/locale/iso8859-15/ComposeNear the bottom there is a line that reads: Ctrl<t> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequartersthat should read: Ctrl<T> <quotedbl> <Y> : "\276" threequartersNote the lower case <t>. Changing this line should make C-t work.** Irix*** Irix 6.5: Emacs crashes on the SGI R10K, when compiled with GCC.This seems to be fixed in GCC 2.95.*** Irix: Trouble using ptys, or running out of ptys.The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs tobe set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be ableto allocate ptys reliably.* Runtime problems specific to MS-Windows** Emacs exits with "X protocol error" when run with an X server for MS-Windows.A certain X server for Windows had a bug which caused this.Supposedly the newer 32-bit version of this server doesn't have theproblem.** Known problems with the MS-Windows port of Emacs 22.1Using create-fontset-from-ascii-font or the --font startup parameterwith a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font leads to display problems.Use a Latin-only font as your default font. If you want control overwhich font is used to display Chinese, Japanese or Korean character,use create-fontset-from-fontset-spec to define a fontset.Frames are not refreshed while the File or Font dialog or a pop-up menuis displayed. This also means help text for pop-up menus is notdisplayed at all. This is because message handling under Windows issynchronous, so we cannot handle repaint (or any other) messages whilewaiting for a system function to return the result of the dialog orpop-up menu interaction.Windows 95 and Windows NT up to version 4.0 do not support help textfor menus. Help text is only available in later versions of Windows.There are problems with display if mouse-tracking is enabled and themouse is moved off a frame, over another frame then back over the firstframe. A workaround is to click the left mouse button inside the frameafter moving back into it.Some minor flickering still persists during mouse-tracking, althoughnot as severely as in 21.1.An inactive cursor remains in an active window after the WindowsManager driven switch of the focus, until a key is pressed.Windows input methods are not recognized by Emacs. Someof these input methods cause the keyboard to send characters encodedin the appropriate coding system (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Latin-1characters, ISO 8859-8 for Hebrew characters, etc.). To make thiswork, set the keyboard coding system to the appropriate value afteryou activate the Windows input method. For example, if you activatethe Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET". (Emacsought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up theappropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do thatyet.)The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviatedmonth names with consistent widths for some locales on some versionsof Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying systemlibrary function.** Typing Alt-Shift has strange effects on MS-Windows.This combination of keys is a command to change keyboard layout. Ifyou proceed to type another non-modifier key before you let go of Altand Shift, the Alt and Shift act as modifiers in the usual way. Amore permanent work around is to change it to another key combination,or disable it in the keyboard control panel.** Interrupting Cygwin port of Bash from Emacs doesn't work.Cygwin 1.x builds of the ported Bash cannot be interrupted from theMS-Windows version of Emacs. This is due to some change in the Bashport or in the Cygwin library which apparently make Bash ignore thekeyboard interrupt event sent by Emacs to Bash. (Older Cygwin portsof Bash, up to b20.1, did receive SIGINT from Emacs.)** Accessing remote files with ange-ftp hangs the MS-Windows version of Emacs.If the FTP client is the Cygwin port of GNU `ftp', this appears to bedue to some bug in the Cygwin DLL or some incompatibility between itand the implementation of asynchronous subprocesses in the Windowsport of Emacs. Specifically, some parts of the FTP server responsesare not flushed out, apparently due to buffering issues, whichconfuses ange-ftp.The solution is to downgrade to an older version of the Cygwin DLL(version 1.3.2 was reported to solve the problem), or use the stockWindows FTP client, usually found in the `C:\WINDOWS' or 'C:\WINNT'directory. To force ange-ftp use the stock Windows client, set thevariable `ange-ftp-ftp-program-name' to the absolute file name of theclient's executable. For example: (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-name "c:/windows/ftp.exe")If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work aroundthis problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file: (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")** lpr commands don't work on MS-Windows with some cheap printers.This problem may also strike other platforms, but the solution islikely to be a global one, and not Emacs specific.Many cheap inkjet, and even some cheap laser printers, do notprint plain text anymore, they will only print through graphicalprinter drivers. A workaround on MS-Windows is to use Windows' basicbuilt in editor to print (this is possibly the only useful purpose ithas):(setq printer-name "") ;; notepad takes the default(setq lpr-command "notepad") ;; notepad(setq lpr-switches nil) ;; not needed(setq lpr-printer-switch "/P") ;; run notepad as batch printer** Antivirus software interacts badly with the MS-Windows version of Emacs.The usual manifestation of these problems is that subprocesses don'twork or even wedge the entire system. In particular, "M-x shell RET"was reported to fail to work. But other commands also sometimes don'twork when an antivirus package is installed.The solution is to switch the antivirus software to a less aggressivemode (e.g., disable the ``auto-protect'' feature), or even uninstallor disable it entirely.** Pressing the mouse button on MS-Windows does not give a mouse-2 event.This is usually a problem with the mouse driver. Because most Windowsprograms do not do anything useful with the middle mouse button, manymouse drivers allow you to define the wheel press to do somethingdifferent. Some drivers do not even have the option to generate amiddle button press. In such cases, setting the wheel press to"scroll" sometimes works if you press the button twice. Trying ageneric mouse driver might help.** Scrolling the mouse wheel on MS-Windows always scrolls the top window.This is another common problem with mouse drivers. Instead ofgenerating scroll events, some mouse drivers try to fake scroll barmovement. But they are not intelligent enough to handle multiplescroll bars within a frame. Trying a generic mouse driver might help.** Mail sent through Microsoft Exchange in some encodings appears to bemangled and is not seen correctly in Rmail or Gnus. We don't knowexactly what happens, but it isn't an Emacs problem in cases we'veseen.** On MS-Windows, you cannot use the right-hand ALT key and the left-handCTRL key together to type a Control-Meta character.This is a consequence of a misfeature beyond Emacs's control.Under Windows, the AltGr key on international keyboards generates keyevents with the modifiers Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl. Since Emacs cannotdistinguish AltGr from an explicit Right-Alt and Left-Ctrlcombination, whenever it sees Right-Alt and Left-Ctrl it assumes thatAltGr has been pressed. The variable `w32-recognize-altgr' can be setto nil to tell Emacs that AltGr is really Ctrl and Alt.** Under some X-servers running on MS-Windows, Emacs' display is incorrect.The symptoms are that Emacs does not completely erase blank areas of thescreen during scrolling or some other screen operations (e.g., selectivedisplay or when killing a region). M-x recenter will cause the screento be completely redisplayed and the "extra" characters will disappear.This is known to occur under Exceed 6, and possibly earlier versionsas well; it is reportedly solved in version 6.2.0.16 and later. Theproblem lies in the X-server settings.There are reports that you can solve the problem with Exceed byrunning `Xconfig' from within NT, choosing "X selection", thenun-checking the boxes "auto-copy X selection" and "auto-paste to Xselection".Of this does not work, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org. Thenplease call support for your X-server and see if you can get a fix.If you do, please send it to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org so we can list ithere.* Build-time problems** Configuration*** The `configure' script doesn't find the jpeg library.There are reports that this happens on some systems because the linkerby default only looks for shared libraries, but jpeg distribution bydefault only installs a nonshared version of the library, `libjpeg.a'.If this is the problem, you can configure the jpeg library with the`--enable-shared' option and then rebuild libjpeg. This produces ashared version of libjpeg, which you need to install. Finally, rerunthe Emacs configure script, which should now find the jpeg library.Alternatively, modify the generated src/Makefile to link the .a fileexplicitly, and edit src/config.h to define HAVE_JPEG.** Compilation*** Building Emacs over NFS fails with ``Text file busy''.This was reported to happen when building Emacs on a GNU/Linux system(RedHat Linux 6.2) using a build directory automounted from Solaris(SunOS 5.6) file server, but it might not be limited to thatconfiguration alone. Presumably, the NFS server doesn't commit thefiles' data to disk quickly enough, and the Emacs executable file isleft ``busy'' for several seconds after Emacs has finished dumpingitself. This causes the subsequent commands which invoke the dumpedEmacs executable to fail with the above message.In some of these cases, a time skew between the NFS server and themachine where Emacs is built is detected and reported by GNU Make(it says that some of the files have modification time in the future).This might be a symptom of NFS-related problems.If the NFS server runs on Solaris, apply the Solaris patch 105379-05(Sunos 5.6: /kernel/misc/nfssrv patch). If that doesn't work, or ifyou have a different version of the OS or the NFS server, you canforce the NFS server to use 1KB blocks, which was reported to fix theproblem albeit at a price of slowing down file I/O. You can force 1KBblocks by specifying the "-o rsize=1024,wsize=1024" options to the`mount' command, or by adding ",rsize=1024,wsize=1024" to the mountoptions in the appropriate system configuration file, such as`/etc/auto.home'.Alternatively, when Make fails due to this problem, you could wait fora few seconds and then invoke Make again. In one particular case,waiting for 10 or more seconds between the two Make invocations seemedto work around the problem.Similar problems can happen if your machine NFS-mounts a directoryonto itself. Suppose the Emacs sources live in `/usr/local/src' andyou are working on the host called `marvin'. Then an entry in the`/etc/fstab' file like the following is asking for trouble: marvin:/usr/local/src /usr/local/src ...options.omitted...The solution is to remove this line from `etc/fstab'.*** Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from oneof the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a releasedversion of GCC newer than 2.95.2 which was prepared around thosedates; similar problems were reported with some snapshots of GCC 3.1around Sep 30 2001. The preprocessor in those versions isincompatible with a traditional Unix cpp (e.g., it expands ".." into". .", which breaks relative file names that reference the parentdirectory; or inserts TAB characters before lines that set Makevariables).The solution is to make sure the preprocessor is run with the`-traditional' option. The `configure' script does that automaticallywhen it detects the known problems in your cpp, but you might hit someunknown ones. To force the `configure' script to use `-traditional',run the script like this: CPP='gcc -E -traditional' ./configure ...(replace the ellipsis "..." with any additional arguments you pass tothe script).Note that this problem does not pertain to the MS-Windows port ofEmacs, since it doesn't use the preprocessor to generate Makefiles.*** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing.*** Compiling wakeup, in lib-src, says it can't make wakeup.c.This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That versionhad a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly.To solve theproblem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerun Emacs'sconfigure script.*** Compiling lib-src says there is no rule to make test-distrib.c.This results from a bug in a VERY old version of GNU Sed. To solvethe problem, install the current version of GNU Sed, then rerunEmacs's configure script.*** Building the MS-Windows port with Cygwin GCC can fail.Emacs may not build using recent Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwinversion 1.1.8, using the default configure settings. It appears to benecessary to specify the -mwin32 flag when compiling, and define__MSVCRT__, like so: configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__*** Building the MS-Windows port fails with a CreateProcess failure.Some versions of mingw32 make on some versions of Windows do not seemto detect the shell correctly. Try "make SHELL=cmd.exe", or if thatfails, try running make from Cygwin bash instead.*** Building the MS-Windows port with Leim fails in the `leim' directory.The error message might be something like this: Converting d:/emacs-21.3/leim/CXTERM-DIC/4Corner.tit to quail-package... Invalid ENCODE: value in TIT dictionary NMAKE : fatal error U1077: '"../src/obj-spd/i386/emacs.exe"' : return code '0xffffffff' Stop.This can happen if the Leim distribution is unpacked with a programwhich converts the `*.tit' files to DOS-style CR-LF text format. The`*.tit' files in the leim/CXTERM-DIC directory require Unix-style lineendings to compile properly, because Emacs reads them without any codeor EOL conversions.The solution is to make sure the program used to unpack Leim does notchange the files' line endings behind your back. The GNU FTP site hasin the `/gnu/emacs/windows' directory a program called `djtarnt.exe'which can be used to unpack `.tar.gz' and `.zip' archives withoutmangling them.*** Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, whichdefines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon. The followingpatch to assert.h should solve this:*** include/assert.h.orig Sun Nov 7 02:41:36 1999--- include/assert.h Mon Jan 29 11:49:10 2001****************** 41,47 **** /* * If not debugging, assert does nothing. */! #define assert(x) ((void)0); #else /* debugging enabled */--- 41,47 ---- /* * If not debugging, assert does nothing. */! #define assert(x) ((void)0) #else /* debugging enabled */** Linking*** Building Emacs with a system compiler fails to link because of anundefined symbol such as __eprintf which does not appear in Emacs.This can happen if some of the libraries linked into Emacs were builtwith GCC, but Emacs itself is being linked with a compiler other thanGCC. Object files compiled with GCC might need some helper functionsfrom libgcc.a, the library which comes with GCC, but the systemcompiler does not instruct the linker to search libgcc.a during thelink stage.A solution is to link with GCC, like this: make CC=gccSince the .o object files already exist, this will not recompile Emacswith GCC, but just restart by trying again to link temacs.*** AIX 1.3 ptf 0013: Link failure.There is a real duplicate definition of the function `_slibc_free' inthe library /lib/libc_s.a (just do nm on it to verify). Theworkaround/fix is: cd /lib ar xv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o ar dv libc_s.a NLtmtime.o*** AIX 4.1.2: Linker error messages such as ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o.This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executingthese shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory whereyou build Emacs: cp /usr/lib/libIM.a . chmod 664 libIM.a ranlib libIM.aThen change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (inMakefile).*** Sun with acc: Link failure when using acc on a Sun.To use acc, you need additional options just before the libraries, such as /usr/lang/SC2.0.1/values-Xt.o -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1/cg87 -L/usr/lang/SC2.0.1and you need to add -lansi just before -lc.The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so wecannot easily arrange to supply them.*** Linking says that the functions insque and remque are undefined.Change oldXMenu/Makefile by adding insque.o to the variable OBJS.*** `tparam' reported as a multiply-defined symbol when linking with ncurses.This problem results from an incompatible change in ncurses, inversion 1.9.9e approximately. This version is unable to provide adefinition of tparm without also defining tparam. This is alsoincompatible with Terminfo; as a result, the Emacs Terminfo supportdoes not work with this version of ncurses.The fix is to install a newer version of ncurses, such as version 4.2.** Dumping*** Linux: Segfault during `make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel.With certain recent Linux kernels (like the one of Redhat Fedora Core1 and newer), the new "Exec-shield" functionality is enabled by default, whichcreates a different memory layout that breaks the emacs dumper. Emacs triesto handle this at build time, but if the workaround used fails, theseinstructions can be useful.The work-around explained here is not enough on Fedora Core 4 (and possiblenewer). Read the next item.Configure can overcome the problem of exec-shield if the architecture isx86 and the program setarch is present. On other architectures noworkaround is known.You can check the Exec-shield state like this: cat /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shieldIt returns non-zero when Exec-shield is enabled, 0 otherwise. Pleaseread your system documentation for more details on Exec-shield andassociated commands. Exec-shield can be turned off with this command: echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/exec-shieldWhen Exec-shield is enabled, building Emacs will segfault during theexecution of this command: ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]To work around this problem, it is necessary to temporarily disableExec-shield while building Emacs, or, on x86, by using the `setarch'command when running temacs like this: setarch i386 ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]*** Fedora Core 4 GNU/Linux: Segfault during dumping.In addition to exec-shield explained above "Linux: Segfault during`make bootstrap' under certain recent versions of the Linux kernel"item, Linux kernel shipped with Fedora Core 4 randomizes the virtualaddress space of a process. As the result dumping may fail even ifyou turn off exec-shield. In this case, use the -R option to the setarchcommand: setarch i386 -R ./temacs --batch --load loadup [dump|bootstrap]or setarch i386 -R make bootstrap *** Fatal signal in the command temacs -l loadup inc dump.This command is the final stage of building Emacs. It is run by theMakefile in the src subdirectory, or by build.com on VMS.It has been known to get fatal errors due to insufficient swappingspace available on the machine.On 68000s, it has also happened because of bugs in thesubroutine `alloca'. Verify that `alloca' works right, evenfor large blocks (many pages).*** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered.*** or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127".*** or, temacs runs and dumps emacs, but emacs totally fails to work.*** or, temacs gets errors dumping emacs.This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not befooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these arebinary files and can contain all 256 byte values.In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs.It typically truncates "lines". What appear to be "lines" ina binary file can of course be of any length. Even once `shar'itself is made to work correctly, `sh' discards null characterswhen unpacking the shell archive.I have also seen character \177 changed into \377. I do not knowwhat transfer means caused this problem. Various networkfile transfer programs are suspected of clobbering the high bit.If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in itsnonprinting characters, you can fix them: 1) Record the names of all the .elc files. 2) Delete all the .elc files. 3) Recompile alloc.c with a value of PURESIZE twice as large. (See puresize.h.) You might as well save the old alloc.o. 4) Remake emacs. It should work now. 5) Running emacs, do Meta-x byte-compile-file repeatedly to recreate all the .elc files that used to exist. You may need to increase the value of the variable max-lisp-eval-depth to succeed in running the compiler interpreted on certain .el files. 400 was sufficient as of last report. 6) Reinstall the old alloc.o (undoing changes to alloc.c if any) and remake temacs. 7) Remake emacs. It should work now, with valid .elc files.*** temacs prints "Pure Lisp storage exhausted".This means that the Lisp code loaded from the .elc and .elfiles during temacs -l loadup inc dump took up morespace than was allocated.This could be caused by 1) adding code to the preloaded Lisp files 2) adding more preloaded files in loadup.el 3) having a site-init.el or site-load.el which loads files. Note that ANY site-init.el or site-load.el is nonstandard; if you have received Emacs from some other site and it contains a site-init.el or site-load.el file, consider deleting that file. 4) getting the wrong .el or .elc files (not from the directory you expected). 5) deleting some .elc files that are supposed to exist. This would cause the source files (.el files) to be loaded instead. They take up more room, so you lose. 6) a bug in the Emacs distribution which underestimates the space required.If the need for more space is legitimate, change the definitionof PURESIZE in puresize.h.But in some of the cases listed above, this problem is a consequenceof something else that is wrong. Be sure to check and fix the realproblem.*** Linux: Emacs crashes when dumping itself on Mac PPC running Yellow Dog GNU/Linux.The crashes happen inside the function Fmake_symbol; here's a typicalC backtrace printed by GDB: 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol () (gdb) where #0 0x190c0c0 in Fmake_symbol () #1 0x1942ca4 in init_obarray () #2 0x18b3500 in main () #3 0x114371c in __libc_start_main (argc=5, argv=0x7ffff5b4, envp=0x7ffff5cc,This could happen because GCC version 2.95 and later changed the baseof the load address to 0x10000000. Emacs needs to be told about this,but we currently cannot do that automatically, because that breaksother versions of GNU/Linux on the MacPPC. Until we find a way todistinguish between the Yellow Dog and the other varieties ofGNU/Linux systems on the PPC, you will have to manually uncomment thefollowing section near the end of the file src/m/macppc.h in the Emacsdistribution: #if 0 /* This breaks things on PPC GNU/Linux except for Yellowdog, even with identical GCC, as, ld. Let's take it out until we know what's really going on here. */ /* GCC 2.95 and newer on GNU/Linux PPC changed the load address to 0x10000000. */ #if defined __linux__ #if __GNUC__ > 2 || (__GNUC__ == 2 && __GNUC_MINOR__ >= 95) #define DATA_SEG_BITS 0x10000000 #endif #endif #endif /* 0 */Remove the "#if 0" and "#endif" directives which surround this, savethe file, and then reconfigure and rebuild Emacs. The dumping processshould now succeed.** Installation*** Installing Emacs gets an error running `install-info'.You need to install a recent version of Texinfo; that packagesupplies the `install-info' command.** First execution*** Emacs binary is not in executable format, and cannot be run.This was reported to happen when Emacs is built in a directory mountedvia NFS, for some combinations of NFS client and NFS server.Usually, the file `emacs' produced in these cases is full ofbinary null characters, and the `file' utility says: emacs: ASCII text, with no line terminatorsWe don't know what exactly causes this failure. A work-around is tobuild Emacs in a directory on a local disk.*** The dumped Emacs crashes when run, trying to write pure data.Two causes have been seen for such problems.1) On a system where getpagesize is not a system call, it is definedas a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong,it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correctvalue in the man page for a.out (5).2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among theinitialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in mostof its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static andnot initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems youmay need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file.* Emacs 19 problems** Error messages `Wrong number of arguments: #<subr where-is-internal>, 5'.This typically results from having the powerkey library loaded.Powerkey was designed for Emacs 19.22. It is obsolete now becauseEmacs 19 now has this feature built in; and powerkey also callswhere-is-internal in an obsolete way.So the fix is to arrange not to load powerkey.* Runtime problems on legacy systemsThis section covers bugs reported on very old hardware or software.If you are using hardware and an operating system shipped after 2000,it is unlikely you will see any of these.** Ancient operating systemsAIX 4.2 was end-of-lifed on Dec 31st, 1999.*** AIX: You get this compiler error message: Processing include file ./XMenuInt.h 1501-106: (S) Include file X11/Xlib.h not found.This means your system was installed with only the X11 runtime i.dlibraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and installX11Dev... with smit.(This report must be ancient. Bootable tapes are long dead.)*** AIX 3.2.4: Releasing Ctrl/Act key has no effect, if Shift is down.Due to a feature of AIX, pressing or releasing the Ctrl/Act key isignored when the Shift, Alt or AltGr keys are held down. This canlead to the keyboard being "control-locked"--ordinary letters aretreated as control characters.You can get out of this "control-locked" state by pressing andreleasing Ctrl/Act while not pressing or holding any other keys.*** AIX 3.2.5: You get this message when running Emacs: Could not load program emacs Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined Error was: Exec format erroror this one: Could not load program .emacs Symbol _system_con in csh is undefined Symbol _fp_trapsta in csh is undefined Error was: Exec format errorThese can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that wascompiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile.*** AIX 4.2: Emacs gets a segmentation fault at startup.If you are using IBM's xlc compiler, compile emacs.cwithout optimization; that should avoid the problem.*** ISC Unix**** ISC: display-time causes kernel problems on ISC systems.Under Interactive Unix versions 3.0.1 and 4.0 (and probably otherversions), display-time causes the loss of large numbers of STREVENTcells. Eventually the kernel's supply of these cells is exhausted.This makes emacs and the whole system run slow, and can make otherprocesses die, in particular pcnfsd.Other emacs functions that communicate with remote processes may havethe same problem. Display-time seems to be far the worst.The only known fix: Don't run display-time.*** SunOSSunOS 4.1.4 stopped shipping on Sep 30 1998.**** SunOS: You get linker errors ld: Undefined symbol _get_wmShellWidgetClass _get_applicationShellWidgetClass**** Sun 4.0.x: M-x shell persistently reports "Process shell exited abnormally with code 1".This happened on Suns as a result of what is said to be a bug in Sunosversion 4.0.x. The only fix was to reboot the machine.**** SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3: Mail is lost when sent to local aliases.Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use thesendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to bedelivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually)program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, whichmeans that the name of the recipient of the message is not on thecommand line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message toobtain the destination address.There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail.In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognizenon-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (whichhave other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the timeof this writing, these official versions are available: Sendmail V8 on ftp.cs.berkeley.edu in /ucb/sendmail: sendmail.8.6.9.base.tar.Z (the base system source & documentation) sendmail.8.6.9.cf.tar.Z (configuration files) sendmail.8.6.9.misc.tar.Z (miscellaneous support programs) sendmail.8.6.9.xdoc.tar.Z (extended documentation, with postscript) IDA sendmail on vixen.cso.uiuc.edu in /pub: sendmail-5.67b+IDA-1.5.tar.gz**** Sunos 4: You get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version.This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meantfor acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete/usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory.**** SunOS 4.1.3: Emacs unpredictably crashes in _yp_dobind_soft.This happens if you configure Emacs specifying just `sparc-sun-sunos4'on a system that is version 4.1.3. You must specify the preciseversion number (or let configure figure out the configuration, whichit can do perfectly well for SunOS).**** Sunos 4.1.3: Emacs gets hung shortly after startup.We think this is due to a bug in Sunos. The word is thatone of these Sunos patches fixes the bug:100075-11 100224-06 100347-03 100482-05 100557-02 100623-03 100804-03 101080-01100103-12 100249-09 100496-02 100564-07 100630-02 100891-10 101134-01100170-09 100296-04 100377-09 100507-04 100567-04 100650-02 101070-01 101145-01100173-10 100305-15 100383-06 100513-04 100570-05 100689-01 101071-03 101200-02100178-09 100338-05 100421-03 100536-02 100584-05 100784-01 101072-01 101207-01We don't know which of these patches really matter. If you find outwhich ones, please inform bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.**** SunOS 4: Emacs processes keep going after you kill the X server(or log out, if you logged in using X).Someone reported that recompiling with GCC 2.7.0 fixed this problem.The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0or link libXmu statically.**** Sunos 5.3: Subprocesses remain, hanging but not zombies.A bug in Sunos 5.3 causes Emacs subprocesses to remain after Emacsexits. Sun patch # 101415-02 is part of the fix for this, but it onlyapplies to ptys, and doesn't fix the problem with subprocessescommunicating through pipes.*** Apollo Domain**** Shell mode ignores interrupts on Apollo Domain.You may find that M-x shell prints the following message: Warning: no access to tty; thus no job control in this shell...This can happen if there are not enough ptys on your system.Here is how to make more of them. % cd /dev % ls pty* # shows how many pty's you have. I had 8, named pty0 to pty7) % /etc/crpty 8 # creates eight new pty's*** Irix*** Irix 6.2: No visible display on mips-sgi-irix6.2 when compiling with GCC 2.8.1.This problem went away after installing the latest IRIX patchesas of 8 Dec 1998.The same problem has been reported on Irix 6.3.*** Irix 6.3: substituting environment variables in file namesin the minibuffer gives peculiar error messages such as Substituting nonexistent environment variable ""This is not an Emacs bug; it is caused by something in SGI patch003082 August 11, 1998.*** OPENSTEP**** OPENSTEP 4.2: Compiling syntax.c with gcc 2.7.2.1 fails.The compiler was reported to crash while compiling syntax.c with thefollowing message: cc: Internal compiler error: program cc1obj got fatal signal 11To work around this, replace the macros UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD,INC_BOTH, and INC_FROM with functions. To this end, first define 3functions, one each for every macro. Here's an example: static int update_syntax_table_forward(int from) { return(UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD(from)); }/*update_syntax_table_forward*/Then replace all references to UPDATE_SYNTAX_TABLE_FORWARD in syntax.cwith a call to the function update_syntax_table_forward.*** Solaris 2.x**** Strange results from format %d in a few cases, on a Sun.Sun compiler version SC3.0 has been found to miscompile part ofeditfns.c. The workaround is to compile with some other compiler suchas GCC.**** On Solaris, Emacs dumps core if lisp-complete-symbol is called.If you compile Emacs with the -fast or -xO4 option with version 3.0.2of the Sun C compiler, Emacs dumps core when lisp-complete-symbol iscalled. The problem does not happen if you compile with GCC.**** On Solaris, Emacs crashes if you use (display-time).This can happen if you configure Emacs without specifying the preciseversion of Solaris that you are using.**** Solaris 2.3 and 2.4: Unpredictable segmentation faults.A user reported that this happened in 19.29 when it was compiled withthe Sun compiler, but not when he recompiled with GCC 2.7.0.We do not know whether something in Emacs is partly to blame for this.**** Solaris 2.4: Emacs dumps core on startup.Bill Sebok says that the cause of this is Solaris 2.4 vendor patch102303-05, which extends the Solaris linker to deal with the SolarisCommon Desktop Environment's linking needs. You can fix the problemby removing this patch and installing patch 102049-02 instead.However, that linker version won't work with CDE.Solaris 2.5 comes with a linker that has this bug. It is reported that ifyou install all the latest patches (as of June 1996), the bug is fixed.We suspect the crucial patch is one of these, but we don't knowfor certain. 103093-03: [README] SunOS 5.5: kernel patch (2140557 bytes) 102832-01: [README] OpenWindows 3.5: Xview Jumbo Patch (4181613 bytes) 103242-04: [README] SunOS 5.5: linker patch (595363 bytes)(One user reports that the bug was fixed by those patches togetherwith patches 102980-04, 103279-01, 103300-02, and 103468-01.)If you can determine which patch does fix the bug, please tellbug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.Meanwhile, the GNU linker links Emacs properly on both Solaris 2.4 andSolaris 2.5.**** Solaris 2.4: Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangsforever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie.casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.soafter changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines #if ThreadedX #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread #endifto: #if OSMinorVersion < 4 #if ThreadedX #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread #endif #endifBe sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4(as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions forOSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC underSolaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update thedefinition for your type of machine and system.Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuildthe makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only onSolaris 2.4, not on 2.3.For multithreaded X to work it is necessary to install patch101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You needto reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing thatpatch.However, Frank Rust <frust@iti.cs.tu-bs.de> used a simpler solution:he changed #define ThreadedX YESto #define ThreadedX NOin sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all`-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile andtyping 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work.**** Solaris 2.x: GCC complains "64 bit integer types not supported".This suggests that GCC is not installed correctly. Most likely youare using GCC 2.7.2.3 (or earlier) on Solaris 2.6 (or later); thisdoes not work without patching. To run GCC 2.7.2.3 on Solaris 2.6 orlater, you must patch fixinc.svr4 and reinstall GCC from scratch asdescribed in the Solaris FAQ<http://www.wins.uva.nl/pub/solaris/solaris2.html>. A better fix isto upgrade to GCC 2.8.1 or later.**** Solaris 2.7: Building Emacs with WorkShop Compilers 5.0 98/12/15C 5.0 failed, apparently with non-default CFLAGS, most probably due tocompiler bugs. Using Sun Solaris 2.7 Sun WorkShop 6 update 1 Crelease was reported to work without problems. It worked OK onanother system with Solaris 8 using apparently the same 5.0 compilerand the default CFLAGS.**** Solaris 2.x: Emacs dumps core when built with Motif.The Solaris Motif libraries are buggy, at least up through Solaris 2.5.1.Install the current Motif runtime library patch appropriate for your host.(Make sure the patch is current; some older patch versions still have the bug.)You should install the other patches recommended by Sun for your host, too.You can obtain Sun patches from ftp://sunsolve.sun.com/pub/patches/;look for files with names ending in `.PatchReport' to see which patchesare currently recommended for your host.On Solaris 2.6, Emacs is said to work with Motif when Solaris patch105284-12 is installed, but fail when 105284-15 is installed.105284-18 might fix it again.**** Solaris 2.6 and 7: the Compose key does not work.This is a bug in Motif in Solaris. Supposedly it has been fixed forthe next major release of Solaris. However, if someone with Sunsupport complains to Sun about the bug, they may release a patch.If you do this, mention Sun bug #4188711.One workaround is to use a locale that allows non-ASCII characters.For example, before invoking emacs, set the LC_ALL environmentvariable to "en_US" (American English). The directory /usr/lib/localelists the supported locales; any locale other than "C" or "POSIX"should do.pen@lysator.liu.se says (Feb 1998) that the Compose key does workif you link with the MIT X11 libraries instead of the Solaris X11libraries.*** HP/UX versions before 11.0HP/UX 9 was end-of-lifed in December 1998.HP/UX 10 was end-of-lifed in May 1999.**** HP/UX 9: Emacs crashes with SIGBUS or SIGSEGV after you delete a frame.We think this is due to a bug in the X libraries provided by HP. Withthe alternative X libraries in /usr/contrib/mitX11R5/lib, the problemdoes not happen.*** HP/UX 10: Large file support is disabled.See the comments in src/s/hpux10.h.*** HP/UX: Emacs is slow using X11R5.This happens if you use the MIT versions of the X libraries--itdoesn't run as fast as HP's version. People sometimes use the versionbecause they see the HP version doesn't have the libraries libXaw.a,libXmu.a, libXext.a and others. HP/UX normally doesn't come withthose libraries installed. To get good performance, you need toinstall them and rebuild Emacs.*** Ultrix and Digital Unix**** Ultrix 4.2: `make install' fails on install-doc with `Error 141'.This happens on Ultrix 4.2 due to failure of a pipeline of tarcommands. We don't know why they fail, but the bug seems not to be inEmacs. The workaround is to run the shell command in install-doc byhand.**** Digital Unix 4.0: Garbled display on non-X terminals when Emacs runs.So far it appears that running `tset' triggers this problem (when TERMis vt100, at least). If you do not run `tset', then Emacs displaysproperly. If someone can tell us precisely which effect of running`tset' actually causes the problem, we may be able to implement a fixin Emacs.**** Ultrix: `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on.On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up informationin the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by usingexpand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not workin the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on.The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or inanything it loads. Yuck - some solution.I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what isgoing on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know.Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is includedin the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host.*** SVr4**** SVr4: On some variants of SVR4, Emacs does not work at all with X.Try defining BROKEN_FIONREAD in your config.h file. If this solvesthe problem, please send a bug report to tell us this is needed; besure to say exactly what type of machine and system you are using.**** SVr4: After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash.Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of themmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctlythe first time, and then crash when run a second time.Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time,you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to youroperating system description file (whose name is reported by theconfigure script) that reads:#define SYSTEM_MALLOCThis makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work aroundthe kernel bug.*** Irix 5 and earlierExactly when Irix-5 end-of-lifed is obscure. But since Irix 6.0shipped in 1994, it has been some years.**** Irix 5.2: unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h.The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in theIrix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional filesetcompiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgyworkaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead ofsyms.h.**** Irix 5.3: "out of virtual swap space".This message occurs when the system runs out of swap space due to toomany large programs running. The solution is either to provide moreswap space or to reduce the number of large programs being run. Youcan check the current status of the swap space by executing thecommand `swap -l'.You can increase swap space by changing the file /etc/fstab. Adding aline like this:/usr/swap/swap.more swap swap pri=3 0 0where /usr/swap/swap.more is a file previously created (for instanceby using /etc/mkfile), will increase the swap space by the size ofthat file. Execute `swap -m' or reboot the machine to activate thenew swap area. See the manpages for `swap' and `fstab' for furtherinformation.The objectserver daemon can use up lots of memory because it can beswamped with NIS information. It collects information about all userson the network that can log on to the host.If you want to disable the objectserver completely, you can executethe command `chkconfig objectserver off' and reboot. That may disablesome of the window system functionality, such as responding CDROMicons.You can also remove NIS support from the objectserver. The SGI `admin'FAQ has a detailed description on how to do that; see question 35("Why isn't the objectserver working?"). The admin FAQ can be found atftp://viz.tamu.edu/pub/sgi/faq/.**** Irix 5.3: Emacs crashes in utmpname.This problem is fixed in Patch 3175 for Irix 5.3.It is also fixed in Irix versions 6.2 and up.**** Irix 6.0: Make tries (and fails) to build a program named unexelfsgi.A compiler bug inserts spaces into the string "unexelfsgi . o"in src/Makefile. Edit src/Makefile, after configure is run,find that string, and take out the spaces.Compiler fixes in Irix 6.0.1 should eliminate this problem.*** SCO Unix and UnixWare**** SCO 3.2v4: Unusable default font.The Open Desktop environment comes with default X resource settingsthat tell Emacs to use a variable-width font. Emacs cannot use suchfonts, so it does not work.This is caused by the file /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/ScoTerm, which isthe application-specific resource file for the `scoterm' terminalemulator program. It contains several extremely general X resourcesthat affect other programs besides `scoterm'. In particular, theseresources affect Emacs also: *Font: -*-helvetica-medium-r-*--12-*-p-* *Background: scoBackground *Foreground: scoForegroundThe best solution is to create an application-specific resource file forEmacs, /usr/lib/X11/sco/startup/Emacs, with the following contents: Emacs*Font: -*-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1 Emacs*Background: white Emacs*Foreground: black(These settings mimic the Emacs defaults, but you can change them tosuit your needs.) This resource file is only read when the X serverstarts up, so you should restart it by logging out of the Open Desktopenvironment or by running `scologin stop; scologin start` from the shellas root. Alternatively, you can put these settings in the/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Emacs resource file and simply restart Emacs,but then they will not affect remote invocations of Emacs that use theOpen Desktop display.These resource files are not normally shared across a network of SCOmachines; you must create the file on each machine individually.**** SCO 4.2.0: Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems.On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiledwith the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft Cversion 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; QuickC Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile withGCC.**** UnixWare 2.1: Error 12 (virtual memory exceeded) when dumping Emacs.Paul Abrahams (abrahams@acm.org) reports that with the installedvirtual memory settings for UnixWare 2.1.2, an Error 12 occurs duringthe "make" that builds Emacs, when running temacs to dump emacs. Thaterror indicates that the per-process virtual memory limit has beenexceeded. The default limit is probably 32MB. Raising the virtualmemory limit to 40MB should make it possible to finish building Emacs.You can do this with the command `ulimit' (sh) or `limit' (csh).But you have to be root to do it.According to Martin Sohnius, you can also retune this in the kernel: # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SDATLIM 33554432 ## soft data size limit # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HDATLIM 33554432 ## hard " # /etc/conf/bin/idtune SVMMSIZE unlimited ## soft process size limit # /etc/conf/bin/idtune HVMMSIZE unlimited ## hard " # /etc/conf/bin/idbuild -B(He recommends you not change the stack limit, though.)These changes take effect when you reboot.*** Linux 1.x**** Linux 1.0-1.04: Typing C-c C-c in Shell mode kills your X server.This happens with Linux kernel 1.0 thru 1.04, approximately. The workaround isto define SIGNALS_VIA_CHARACTERS in config.h and recompile Emacs.Newer Linux kernel versions don't have this problem.**** Linux 1.3: Output from subprocess (such as man or diff) is randomlytruncated on GNU/Linux systems.This is due to a kernel bug which seems to be fixed in Linux version1.3.75.** Windows 3.1, 95, 98, and ME*** MS-Windows NT/95: Problems running Perl under Emacs`perl -de 0' just hangs when executed in an Emacs subshell.The fault lies with Perl (indirectly with Windows NT/95).The problem is that the Perl debugger explicitly opens a connection to"CON", which is the DOS/NT equivalent of "/dev/tty", for interactingwith the user.On Unix, this is okay, because Emacs (or the shell?) creates apseudo-tty so that /dev/tty is really the pipe Emacs is using tocommunicate with the subprocess.On NT, this fails because CON always refers to the handle for therelevant console (approximately equivalent to a tty), and cannot beredirected to refer to the pipe Emacs assigned to the subprocess asstdin.A workaround is to modify perldb.pl to use STDIN/STDOUT instead of CON.For Perl 4: *** PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL.orig Wed May 26 08:24:18 1993 --- PERL/LIB/PERLDB.PL Mon Jul 01 15:28:16 1996 *************** *** 68,74 **** $rcfile=".perldb"; } else { ! $console = "con"; $rcfile="perldb.ini"; } --- 68,74 ---- $rcfile=".perldb"; } else { ! $console = ""; $rcfile="perldb.ini"; } For Perl 5: *** perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl.orig Sun Jun 04 21:13:40 1995 --- perl/5.001/lib/perl5db.pl Mon Jul 01 17:00:08 1996 *************** *** 22,28 **** $rcfile=".perldb"; } elsif (-e "con") { ! $console = "con"; $rcfile="perldb.ini"; } else { --- 22,28 ---- $rcfile=".perldb"; } elsif (-e "con") { ! $console = ""; $rcfile="perldb.ini"; } else {*** MS-Windows 95: Alt-f6 does not get through to Emacs.This character seems to be trapped by the kernel in Windows 95.You can enter M-f6 by typing ESC f6.*** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: subprocesses do not terminate properly.This is a limitation of the Operating System, and can cause problemswhen shutting down Windows. Ensure that all subprocesses are exitedcleanly before exiting Emacs. For more details, see the FAQ athttp://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/.*** MS-Windows 95/98/ME: crashes when Emacs invokes non-existent programs.When a program you are trying to run is not found on the PATH,Windows might respond by crashing or locking up your system. Inparticular, this has been reported when trying to compile a Javaprogram in JDEE when javac.exe is installed, but not on the systemPATH.** MS-DOS*** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows NT, "config msdos" fails.If the error message is "VDM has been already loaded", this is becauseWindows has a program called `redir.exe' that is incompatible with aprogram by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used byconfig.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory tothe front of your PATH environment variable.*** When compiling with DJGPP on MS-Windows 95, Make fails for some targetslike make-docfile.This can happen if long file name support (the setting of environmentvariable LFN) when Emacs distribution was unpacked and duringcompilation are not the same. See the MSDOG section of INSTALL forthe explanation of how to avoid this problem.*** Emacs compiled with DJGPP complains at startup: "Wrong type of argument: internal-facep, msdos-menu-active-face"This can happen if you define an environment variable `TERM'. Emacson MSDOS uses an internal terminal emulator which is disabled if thevalue of `TERM' is anything but the string "internal". Emacs thenworks as if its terminal were a dumb glass teletype that doesn'tsupport faces. To work around this, arrange for `TERM' to beundefined when Emacs runs. The best way to do that is to add an[emacs] section to the DJGPP.ENV file which defines an empty value for`TERM'; this way, only Emacs gets the empty value, while the rest ofyour system works as before.*** MS-DOS: Emacs crashes at startup.Some users report that Emacs 19.29 requires dpmi memory management,and crashes on startup if the system does not have it. We don't yetknow why this happens--perhaps these machines don't have enough realmemory, or perhaps something is wrong in Emacs or the compiler.However, arranging to use dpmi support is a workaround.You can find out if you have a dpmi host by running go32 withoutarguments; it will tell you if it uses dpmi memory. For moreinformation about dpmi memory, consult the djgpp FAQ. (djgppis the GNU C compiler as packaged for MSDOS.)Compiling Emacs under MSDOS is extremely sensitive for proper memoryconfiguration. If you experience problems during compilation, considerremoving some or all memory resident programs (notably disk caches)and make sure that your memory managers are properly configured. Seethe djgpp faq for configuration hints.*** Emacs compiled with DJGPP for MS-DOS/MS-Windows cannot access filesin the directory with the special name `dev' under the root of anydrive, e.g. `c:/dev'.This is an unfortunate side-effect of the support for Unix-styledevice names such as /dev/null in the DJGPP runtime library. Awork-around is to rename the problem directory to another name.*** MS-DOS+DJGPP: Problems on MS-DOG if DJGPP v2.0 is used to compile Emacs.There are two DJGPP library bugs which cause problems: * Running `shell-command' (or `compile', or `grep') you get `Searching for program: permission denied (EACCES), c:/command.com'; * After you shell to DOS, Ctrl-Break kills Emacs.To work around these bugs, you can use two files in the msdossubdirectory: `is_exec.c' and `sigaction.c'. Compile them and linkthem into the Emacs executable `temacs'; then they will replace theincorrect library functions.*** MS-DOS: Emacs compiled for MSDOS cannot find some Lisp files, or otherrun-time support files, when long filename support is enabled.Usually, this problem will manifest itself when Emacs exitsimmediately after flashing the startup screen, because it cannot findthe Lisp files it needs to load at startup. Redirect Emacs stdoutand stderr to a file to see the error message printed by Emacs.Another manifestation of this problem is that Emacs is unable to loadthe support for editing program sources in languages such as C andLisp.This can happen if the Emacs distribution was unzipped without LFNsupport, thus causing long filenames to be truncated to the first 6characters and a numeric tail that Windows 95 normally attaches to it.You should unzip the files again with a utility that supports longfilenames (such as djtar from DJGPP or InfoZip's UnZip programcompiled with DJGPP v2). The MSDOG section of the file INSTALLexplains this issue in more detail.Another possible reason for such failures is that Emacs compiled forMSDOS is used on Windows NT, where long file names are not supportedby this version of Emacs, but the distribution was unpacked by anunzip program that preserved the long file names instead of truncatingthem to DOS 8+3 limits. To be useful on NT, the MSDOS port of Emacsmust be unzipped by a DOS utility, so that long file names areproperly truncated.** Archaic window managers and toolkits*** OpenLook: Under OpenLook, the Emacs window disappears when you type M-q.Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quitcommand for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to useEmacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the windowmanager to use some other command. You can disable theshortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults: OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False**** twm: A position you specified in .Xdefaults is ignored, using twm.twm normally ignores "program-specified" positions.You can tell it to obey them with this command in your `.twmrc' file: UsePPosition "on" #allow clients to request a position** Bugs related to old DEC hardware*** The Compose key on a DEC keyboard does not work as Meta key.This shell command should fix it: xmodmap -e 'keycode 0xb1 = Meta_L'*** Keyboard input gets confused after a beep when using a DECserveras a concentrator.This problem seems to be a matter of configuring the DECserver to use7 bit characters rather than 8 bit characters.* Build problems on legacy systems** BSD/386 1.0: --with-x-toolkit option configures wrong.This problem is due to bugs in the shell in version 1.0 of BSD/386.The workaround is to edit the configure file to use some other shell,such as bash.** Digital Unix 4.0: Emacs fails to build, giving error message Invalid dimension for the charset-ID 160This is due to a bug or an installation problem in GCC 2.8.0.Installing a more recent version of GCC fixes the problem.** Digital Unix 4.0: Failure in unexec while dumping emacs.This problem manifests itself as an error message unexec: Bad address, writing data section to ...The user suspects that this happened because his X librarieswere built for an older system version, ./configure --x-includes=/usr/include --x-libraries=/usr/shlibmade the problem go away.** Sunos 4.1.1: there are errors compiling sysdep.c.If you get errors such as "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union "sysdep.c", line 2017: undefined structure or union "sysdep.c", line 2019: nodename undefinedThis can result from defining LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It is very trickyto use that environment variable with Emacs. The Emacs configurescript links many test programs with the system libraries; you mustmake sure that the libraries available to configure are the sameones available when you build Emacs.** SunOS 4.1.1: You get this error message from GNU ld: /lib/libc.a(_Q_sub.o): Undefined symbol __Q_get_rp_rd referenced from text segmentThe problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld.The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun.** Sunos 4.1: Undefined symbols when linking using --with-x-toolkit.If you get the undefined symbols _atowc _wcslen, _iswprint, _iswspace,_iswcntrl, _wcscpy, and _wcsncpy, then you need to add -lXwchar after-lXaw in the command that links temacs.This problem seems to arise only when the international languageextensions to X11R5 are installed.** SunOS: Emacs gets error message from linker on Sun.If the error message says that a symbol such as `f68881_used' or`ffpa_used' or `start_float' is undefined, this probably indicatesthat you have compiled some libraries, such as the X libraries,with a floating point option other than the default.It's not terribly hard to make this work with small changes incrt0.c together with linking with Fcrt1.o, Wcrt1.o or Mcrt1.o.However, the easiest approach is to build Xlib with the defaultfloating point option: -fsoft.** SunOS: Undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym and/or _dlclose.If you see undefined symbols _dlopen, _dlsym, or _dlclose when linkingwith -lX11, compile and link against the file mit/util/misc/dlsym.c inthe MIT X11R5 distribution. Alternatively, link temacs using sharedlibraries with s/sunos4shr.h. (This doesn't work if you use the Xtoolkit.)If you get the additional error that the linker could not findlib_version.o, try extracting it from X11/usr/lib/X11/libvim.a inX11R4, then use it in the link.** SunOS4, DGUX 5.4.2: --with-x-toolkit version crashes when used with shared libraries.On some systems, including Sunos 4 and DGUX 5.4.2 and perhaps others,unexec doesn't work properly with the shared library for the Xtoolkit. You might be able to work around this by using a nonsharedlibXt.a library. The real fix is to upgrade the various versions ofunexec and/or ralloc. We think this has been fixed on Sunos 4and Solaris in version 19.29.** HPUX 10.20: Emacs crashes during dumping on the HPPA machine.This seems to be due to a GCC bug; it is fixed in GCC 2.8.1.** VMS: Compilation errors on VMS.You will get warnings when compiling on VMS because there arevariable names longer than 32 (or whatever it is) characters.This is not an error. Ignore it.VAX C does not support #if defined(foo). Uses of this constructwere removed, but some may have crept back in. They must be rewritten.There is a bug in the C compiler which fails to sign extend charactersin conditional expressions. The bug is: char c = -1, d = 1; int i; i = d ? c : d;The result is i == 255; the fix is to typecast the char in theconditional expression as an (int). Known occurrences of suchconstructs in Emacs have been fixed.** Vax C compiler bugs affecting Emacs.You may get one of these problems compiling Emacs: foo.c line nnn: compiler error: no table entry for op STASG foo.c: fatal error in /lib/ccomThese are due to bugs in the C compiler; the code is valid C.Unfortunately, the bugs are unpredictable: the same constructmay compile properly or trigger one of these bugs, dependingon what else is in the source file being compiled. Even changesin header files that should not affect the file being compiledcan affect whether the bug happens. In addition, sometimes filesthat compile correctly on one machine get this bug on another machine.As a result, it is hard for me to make sure this bug will not affectyou. I have attempted to find and alter these constructs, but morecan always appear. However, I can tell you how to deal with it if itshould happen. The bug comes from having an indexed reference to anarray of Lisp_Objects, as an argument in a function call: Lisp_Object *args; ... ... foo (5, args[i], ...)...putting the argument into a temporary variable first, as in Lisp_Object *args; Lisp_Object tem; ... tem = args[i]; ... foo (r, tem, ...)...causes the problem to go away.The `contents' field of a Lisp vector is an array of Lisp_Objects,so you may see the problem happening with indexed references to that.** 68000 C compiler problemsVarious 68000 compilers have different problems.These are some that have been observed.*** Using value of assignment expression on union type loses.This means that x = y = z; or foo (x = z); does not workif x is of type Lisp_Object.*** "cannot reclaim" error.This means that an expression is too complicated. You get the correctline number in the error message. The code must be rewritten withsimpler expressions.*** XCONS, XSTRING, etc macros produce incorrect code.If temacs fails to run at all, this may be the cause.Compile this test program and look at the assembler code:struct foo { char x; unsigned int y : 24; };lose (arg) struct foo arg;{ test ((int *) arg.y);}If the code is incorrect, your compiler has this problem.In the XCONS, etc., macros in lisp.h you must replace (a).u.val with((a).u.val + coercedummy) where coercedummy is declared as int.This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your typeof machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE. That is the recommended setting now.*** C compilers lose on returning unions.I hear that some C compilers cannot handle returning a union type.Most of the functions in GNU Emacs return type Lisp_Object, which isdefined as a union on some rare architectures.This problem will not happen if the m-...h file for your typeof machine defines NO_UNION_TYPE.Copyright 1987, 1988, 1989, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.Copying and redistribution of this file with or without modificationare permitted without royalty provided this notice is preserved.Local variables:mode: outlineparagraph-separate: "[ ]*$"end:arch-tag: 49fc0d95-88cb-4715-b21c-f27fb5a4764a