-*- mode:outline -*- This file describes various problems that have been encountered in compiling, installing and running XEmacs. It has been updated for XEmacs 21.4. This file is rather large, but we have tried to sort the entries by their respective relevance for XEmacs, but may have not succeeded completely in that task. The file is divided into four parts: - Problems with building XEmacs - Problems with running XEmacs - Compatibility problems - Mule issues Use `C-c C-f' to move to the next equal level of outline, and `C-c C-b' to move to previous equal level. `C-h m' will give more info about the Outline mode. Also, try finding the things you need using one of the search commands XEmacs provides (e.g. `C-s'). General advice: WATCH OUT for your init file! (~/.xemacs/init.el or ~/.emacs) If you observe strange problems, invoke XEmacs with the `-vanilla' option and see if you can repeat the problem. Note that most of the problems described here manifest at RUN time, even those described as BUILD problems. It is quite unusual for a released XEmacs to fail to build. So a "build problem" requires you to tweak the build environment, then rebuild XEmacs. A "runtime problem" is one that can be fixed by proper configuration of the existing build. Compatibility problems and Mule issues are generally runtime problems, but are treated separately for convenience. * Problems with building XEmacs =============================== ** General Much general information is in INSTALL. If it's covered in INSTALL, we don't repeat it here. *** How does I configure to get the buffer tabs/progress bars? These features depend on support for "native widgets". Use the --with-widgets option to configure. Configuration of widgets is automatic for "modern" toolkits (MS Windows, GTK, and Motif), but if you are using Xt and the Athena widgets, you will probably want to specify a "3d" widget set. See configure --usage, and don't forget to install the corresponding development libraries. *** I know I have libfoo installed, but configure doesn't find it. Typical of Linux systems with package managers. To link with a shared library, you only need the shared library. To compile objects that link with it, you need the headers---and distros don't provide them with the libraries. You need the additional "development" package, too. *** Don't use -O2 with gcc 2.8.1 and egcs 1.0 under SPARC architectures without also using `-fno-schedule-insns'. gcc will generate incorrect code otherwise, typically resulting in crashes in the function skip-syntax-backward. *** egcs-1.1 There have been reports of egcs-1.1 not compiling XEmacs correctly on Alpha Linux. There have also been reports that egcs-1.0.3a is O.K. *** Don't use -O2 or -O3 with Cygwin 1.0, CodeFusion-99070 or gcc 2.7.2 on x86 without also using `-fno-strength-reduce'. gcc will generate incorrect code otherwise. This bug is present in at least 2.6.x and 2.7.[0-2]. This bug has been fixed in GCC 2.7.2.1 and later. This bug is O/S independent, but is limited to x86 architectures. This problem is known to be fixed in egcs (or pgcc) 1.0 or later. Unfortunately, later releases of Cygnus-released compilers (not the Net-released ones) have a bug with the same `problem signature'. If you're lucky, you'll get an error while compiling that looks like: event-stream.c:3189: internal error--unrecognizable insn: (insn 256 14 15 (set (reg/v:SI 24) (minus:SI (reg/v:SI 25) (const_int 2))) -1 (insn_list 11 (nil)) (nil)) 0 0 [main] If you're unlucky, your code will simply execute incorrectly. *** Don't use gcc-2.95.2 with -mcpu=ultrasparc on Solaris 2.6. gcc will assume a 64-bit operating system, even though you've merely told it to assume a 64-bit instruction set. *** Don't use -O2 with gcc 2.7.2 under Intel architectures without also using `-fno-caller-saves'. gcc will generate incorrect code otherwise. This bug is still present in gcc 2.7.2.3. There have been no reports to indicate the bug is present in egcs 1.0 (or pgcc 1.0) or later. This bug is O/S independent, but limited to x86 architectures. This problem is known to be fixed in egcs (or pgcc) 1.0 or later. *** When using gcc, you get the error message "undefined symbol __fixunsdfsi". When using gcc, you get the error message "undefined symbol __main". This means that you need to link with the gcc library. It may be called "gcc-gnulib" or "libgcc.a"; figure out where it is, and define LIB_GCC in config.h to point to it. It may also work to use the GCC version of `ld' instead of the standard one. *** Excessive optimization with pgcc can break XEmacs It has been reported on some systems that compiling with -O6 can lead to XEmacs failures. The workaround is to use a lower optimization level. -O2 and -O4 have been tested extensively. All of this depends heavily on the version of pgcc and the version of libc. Snapshots near the release of pgcc-1.0 have been tested extensively and no sign of breakage has been seen on systems using glibc-2. *** src/Makefile and lib-src/Makefile are truncated--most of the file missing. This can happen if configure uses GNU sed version 2.03. That version had a bug. GNU sed version 2.05 works properly. *** When compiling with X11, you get "undefined symbol _XtStrings". This means that you are trying to link emacs against the X11r4 version of libXt.a, but you have compiled either Emacs or the code in the lwlib subdirectory with the X11r5 header files. That doesn't work. Remember, you can't compile lwlib for r4 and emacs for r5, or vice versa. They must be in sync. *** test-distrib says that the distribution has been clobbered or, temacs prints "Command key out of range 0-127" or, temacs runs and dumps xemacs, but xemacs totally fails to work. or, temacs gets errors dumping xemacs This can be because the .elc files have been garbled. Do not be fooled by the fact that most of a .elc file is text: these are binary files and can contain all 256 byte values. In particular `shar' cannot be used for transmitting GNU Emacs. It typically truncates "lines". (this does not apply to GNU shar, which uses uuencode to encode binary files.) If you have a copy of Emacs that has been damaged in its nonprinting characters, you can fix them by running: make all-elc This will rebuild all the needed .elc files. *** `compress' and `uncompress' not found and XFree86 XFree86 installs a very old version of libz.a by default ahead of where more modern version of libz might be installed. This will cause problems when attempting to link against libMagick. The fix is to remove the old libz.a in the X11 binary directory. ** AIX *** On AIX 4.3, you must specify --with-dialogs=athena with configure *** The libXt shipped with AIX 4.3 up to 4.3.2 is broken. This causes xemacs -nw to fail in various ways. The official APAR is this: APAR NUMBER: RESOLVED AS: PROGRAM ERROR ABSTRACT: : LIBXT.A INCORRECT HANDLING OF EXCEPTIONS IN XTAPPADDINPUT The solution is to install X11.base.lib at version >=4.3.2.5. *** On 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.d libraries. You have to find your sipo (bootable tape) and install X11Dev... with smit. *** On AIX 4.1.2, linker error messages such as ld: 0711-212 SEVERE ERROR: Symbol .__quous, found in the global symbol table of archive /usr/lib/libIM.a, was not defined in archive member shr.o. This is a problem in libIM.a. You can work around it by executing these shell commands in the src subdirectory of the directory where you build Emacs: cp /usr/lib/libIM.a . chmod 664 libIM.a ranlib libIM.a Then change -lIM to ./libIM.a in the command to link temacs (in Makefile). *** Excessive optimization on AIX 4.2 can lead to compiler failure. Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu writes: At least at the b34 level, and the latest-and-greatest IBM xlc (3.1.4.4), there are problems with -O3. I haven't investigated further. ** SunOS/Solaris *** Crashes when using Motif libraries, especially with multiple frames. Crashes that produce C-backtraces like this: #0 0xfec9a118 in _libc_kill () from /usr/lib/libc.so.1 #1 0x77f48 in fatal_error_signal (sig=11) at /codes/rpluim/xemacs-21.4/src/emacs.c:539 #2 #3 0xfee929f4 in XFindContext () from /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4 #4 0xfee92930 in XFindContext () from /usr/openwin/lib/libX11.so.4 #5 0xff297e54 in DisplayDestroy () from /usr/dt/lib/libXm.so.4 #6 0xfefbece0 in XtCallCallbackList () from /usr/openwin/lib/libXt.so.4 #7 0xfefc486c in XtPhase2Destroy () from /usr/openwin/lib/libXt.so.4 #8 0xfefc45d0 in _XtDoPhase2Destroy () from /usr/openwin/lib/libXt.so.4 #9 0xfefc43b4 in XtDestroyWidget () from /usr/openwin/lib/libXt.so.4 #10 0x15cf9c in x_delete_device (d=0x523f00) are caused by buggy Motif libraries. Installing the following patches has been reported to solve the problem on Solaris 2.7: 107081-40 107656-07 For information (although they have not been confirmed to work), the equivalent patches for Solaris 2.8 are: 108940-33 108652-25 *** Dumping error when using GNU binutils / GNU ld on a Sun. Errors similar to the following: Dumping under the name xemacs unexec(): dldump(/space/rpluim/xemacs-obj/src/xemacs): ld.so.1: ./temacs: fatal: /space/rpluim/xemacs-obj/src/xemacs: unknown dynamic entry: 1879048176 are caused by using GNU ld. There are several workarounds available: In XEmacs 21.2 or later, configure using the new portable dumper (--pdump). Alternatively, you can link using the Sun version of ld, which is normally held in /usr/ccs/bin. This can be done by one of: - building gcc with these configure flags: configure --with-ld=/usr/ccs/bin/ld --with-as=/usr/ccs/bin/as - adding -B/usr/ccs/bin/ to CFLAGS used to configure XEmacs (Note: The trailing '/' there is significant.) - uninstalling GNU ld. - configuring XEmacs with these environment settings (suggested by Goran Koruga ): LD=/usr/ccs/bin/ld AS=/usr/ccs/bin/as configure The Solaris2 FAQ claims: When you install gcc, don't make the mistake of installing GNU binutils or GNU libc, they are not as capable as their counterparts you get with Solaris 2.x. *** 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/SC2.0.1 and you need to add -lansi just before -lc. The precise file names depend on the compiler version, so we cannot easily arrange to supply them. *** Problems finding X11 libraries on Solaris with Openwindows Some users have reported problems in this area. The reported solution is to define the environment variable OPENWINHOME, even if you must set it to `/usr/openwin'. *** Sed problems on Solaris 2.5 There have been reports of Sun sed truncating very lines in the Makefile during configuration. The workaround is to use GNU sed or, even better, think of a better way to generate Makefile, and send us a patch. :-) *** On Solaris 2 I get undefined symbols from libcurses.a. You probably have /usr/ucblib/ on your LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Do the link with LD_LIBRARY_PATH unset. Generally, avoid using any ucb* stuff when building XEmacs. *** On Solaris 2 I cannot make alloc.o, glyphs.o or process.o. The SparcWorks C compiler may have difficulty building those modules with optimization level -xO4. Try using only "-fast" optimization for just those modules. (Or use gcc). *** Solaris 2.3 /bin/sh coredumps during configuration. This only occurs if you have LANG != C. This is a known bug with /bin/sh fixed by installing Patch-ID# 101613-01. Or, you can use bash, as a workaround. *** On SunOS, you get linker errors ld: Undefined symbol _get_wmShellWidgetClass _get_applicationShellWidgetClass The fix to this is to install patch 100573 for OpenWindows 3.0 or link libXmu statically. *** On Sunos 4, you get the error ld: Undefined symbol __lib_version. This is the result of using cc or gcc with the shared library meant for acc (the Sunpro compiler). Check your LD_LIBRARY_PATH and delete /usr/lang/SC2.0.1 or some similar directory. *** Undefined symbols when linking on Sunos 4.1. 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 language extensions to X11R5 are installed. *** On a Sun running 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 segment The problem is in the Sun shared C library, not in GNU ld. The solution is to install Patch-ID# 100267-03 from Sun. *** SunOS 4.1.2: undefined symbol _get_wmShellWidgetClass Apparently the version of libXmu.so.a that Sun ships is hosed: it's missing some stuff that is in libXmu.a (the static version). Sun has a patch for this, but a workaround is to use the static version of libXmu, by changing the link command from "-lXmu" to "-Bstatic -lXmu -Bdynamic". If you have OpenWindows 3.0, ask Sun for these patches: 100512-02 4.1.x OpenWindows 3.0 libXt Jumbo patch 100573-03 4.1.x OpenWindows 3.0 undefined symbols with shared libXmu *** Random other SunOS 4.1.[12] link errors. The X headers and libraries that Sun ships in /usr/{include,lib}/X11 are broken. Use the ones in /usr/openwin/{include,lib} instead. ** Linux *** Under Linux, you get "too many arguments to function `getpgrp'". You have probably installed LessTiff under `/usr/local' and `libXm.so' could not be found when linking `getpgrp()' test program, making XEmacs think that `getpgrp()' takes an argument. Try adding `/usr/local/lib' in `/etc/ld.so.conf' and run `ldconfig'. Then run XEmacs's `configure' again. As with all problems of this type, reading the config.log file generated from configure and seeing the log of how the test failed can prove enlightening. *** `Error: No ExtNode to pop!' on Linux systems with Lesstif. This error message has been observed with lesstif-0.75a. It does not appear to cause any harm. *** xemacs: can't resolve symbol '__malloc_hook' This is a Linux problem where you've compiled the XEmacs binary on a libc 5.4 with version higher than 5.4.19 and attempted to run the binary against an earlier version. The solution is to upgrade your old library. ** IRIX *** On Irix 6.5, the MIPSpro compiler gets an internal compiler error The MIPSpro Compiler (at least version 7.2.1) can't seem to handle the union type properly, and fails to compile src/glyphs.c. To avoid this problem, always build ---use-union-type=no (but that's the default, so you should only see this problem if you're an XEmacs maintainer). *** Linking with -rpath on IRIX. Darrell Kindred writes: There are a couple of problems [with use of -rpath with Irix ld], though: 1. The ld in IRIX 5.3 ignores all but the last -rpath spec, so the patched configure spits out a warning if --x-libraries or --site-runtime-libraries are specified under irix 5.x, and it only adds -rpath entries for the --site-runtime-libraries. This bug was fixed sometime between 5.3 and 6.2. 2. IRIX gcc 2.7.2 doesn't accept -rpath directly, so it would have to be prefixed by -Xlinker or "-Wl,". This would be fine, except that configure compiles with ${CC-cc} $CFLAGS $LDFLAGS ... rather than quoting $LDFLAGS with prefix-args, like src/Makefile does. So if you specify --x-libraries or --site-runtime-libraries, you must use --use-gcc=no, or configure will fail. *** On Irix 6.3, the SGI ld quits with segmentation fault when linking temacs This occurs if you use the SGI linker version 7.1. Installing the patch SG0001872 fixes this problem. *** On 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. *** On Irix 5.2, unexelfsgi.c can't find cmplrs/stsupport.h. The file cmplrs/stsupport.h was included in the wrong file set in the Irix 5.2 distribution. You can find it in the optional fileset compiler_dev, or copy it from some other Irix 5.2 system. A kludgy workaround is to change unexelfsgi.c to include sym.h instead of syms.h. *** Coredumping in Irix 6.2 Pete Forman writes: A problem noted by myself and others (I've lost the references) was that XEmacs coredumped when the cut or copy toolbar buttons were pressed. This has been fixed by loading the SGI patchset (Feb 98) without having to recompile XEmacs. My versions are XEmacs 20.3 (problem first noted in 19.15) and IRIX 6.2, compiled using -n32. I'd guess that the relevant individual patch was "SG0002580: multiple fixes for X libraries". SGI recommends that the complete patch set be installed rather than parts of it. ** Digital UNIX/OSF/VMS *** On Digital UNIX, the DEC C compiler might have a problem compiling some files. In particular, src/extents.c and src/faces.c might cause the DEC C compiler to abort. When this happens: cd src, compile the files by hand, cd .., and redo the "make" command. When recompiling the files by hand, use the old C compiler for the following versions of Digital UNIX: - V3.n: Remove "-migrate" from the compile command. - V4.n: Add "-oldc" to the compile command. A related compiler bug has been fixed by the DEC compiler team. The new versions of the compiler should run fine. *** Under some versions of OSF XEmacs runs fine if built without optimization but will crash randomly if built with optimization. Using 'cc -g' is not sufficient to eliminate all optimization. Try 'cc -g -O0' instead. *** Compilation errors on VMS. Sorry, XEmacs does not work under VMS. You might consider working on the port if you really want to have XEmacs work under VMS. ** HP-UX *** On HPUX, the HP C compiler might have a problem compiling some files with optimization. Richard Cognot writes: Had to drop once again to level 2 optimization, at least to compile lstream.c. Otherwise, I get a "variable is void: \if" problem while dumping (this is a problem I already reported with vanilla hpux 10.01 and 9.07, which went away after applying patches for the C compiler). Trouble is I still haven't found the same patch for hpux 10.10, and I don't remember the patch numbers. I think potential XEmacs builders on HP should be warned about this. *** I don't have `xmkmf' and `imake' on my HP. You can get these standard X tools by anonymous FTP to hpcvaaz.cv.hp.com. Essentially all X programs need these. *** On HP-UX, problems with make Marcus Thiessel Some releases of XEmacs (e.g. 20.4) require GNU make to build successfully. You don't need GNU make when building 21.x. *** On HP-UX 9.05 XEmacs won't compile or coredump during the build. Marcus Thiessel This might be a sed problem. For your own safety make sure to use GNU sed while dumping XEmacs. *** On HP-UX 11.0 XEmacs causes excessive X11 errors when running. (also appears on AIX as reported in comp.emacs.xemacs) Marcus Thiessel Unfortunately, XEmacs releases prior to 21.0 don't work with Motif2.1. It will compile but you will get excessive X11 errors like xemacs: X Error of failed request: BadGC (invalid GC parameter) and finally XEmacs gets killed. A workaround is to use the Motif1.2_R6 libraries. You can the following line to your call to configure: --x-libraries="/usr/lib/Motif1.2_R6 -L/usr/lib/X11R6" Make sure /usr/lib/Motif1.2_R6/libXm.sl is a link to /usr/lib/Motif1.2_R6/libXm.3. *** On HP-UX 11.0: Object "" does not have windowed ancestor Marcus Thiessel XEmacs dies without core file and reports: Error: Object "" does not have windowed ancestor. This is a bug. Please apply the patch PHSS_19964 (check if superseded). The other alternative is to link with Motif1.2_R6 (see previous item). ** SCO OpenServer *** Native cc on SCO OpenServer 5 is now OK. Icc may still throw you a curve. Here is what Robert Lipe says: Unlike XEmacs 19.13, building with the native cc on SCO OpenServer 5 now produces a functional binary. I will typically build this configuration for COFF with: /path_to_xemacs_source/configure --with-gcc=no \ --site-includes=/usr/local/include --site-libraries=/usr/local/lib \ --with-xpm --with-xface --with-sound=nas This version now supports ELF builds. I highly recommend this to reduce the in-core footprint of XEmacs. This is now how I compile all my test releases. Build it like this: /path_to_XEmacs_source/configure --with-gcc=no \ --site-includes=/usr/local/include --site-libraries=/usr/local/lib \ --with-xpm --with-xface --with-sound=nas --dynamic The compiler known as icc [ supplied with the OpenServer 5 Development System ] generates a working binary, but it takes forever to generate XEmacs. ICC also whines more about the code than /bin/cc does. I do believe all its whining is legitimate, however. Note that you do have to 'cd src ; make LD=icc' to avoid linker errors. The way I handle the build procedure is: /path_to_XEmacs_source/configure --with-gcc=no \ --site-includes=/usr/local/include --site-libraries=/usr/local/lib \ --with-xpm --with-xface --with-sound=nas --dynamic --compiler="icc" NOTE I have the xpm, xface, and audio libraries and includes in /usr/local/lib, /usr/local/include. If you don't have these, don't include the "--with-*" arguments in any of my examples. In previous versions of XEmacs, you had to override the defaults while compiling font-lock.o and extents.o when building with icc. This seems to no longer be true, but I'm including this old information in case it resurfaces. The process I used was: make -k [ procure pizza, beer, repeat ] cd src make CC="icc -W0,-mP1COPT_max_tree_size=3000" font-lock.o extents.o make LD=icc If you want sound support, get the tls566 supplement from ftp.sco.com:/TLS or any of its mirrors. It works just groovy with XEmacs. The M-x manual-entry is known not to work. If you know Lisp and would like help in making it work, e-mail me at . (UNCHECKED for 19.15 -- it might work). In earlier releases, gnuserv/gnuclient/gnudoit would open a frame just fine, but the client would lock up and the server would terminate when you used C-x # to close the frame. This is now fixed in XEmacs. In etc/ there are two files of note. emacskeys.sco and emacsstrs.sco. The comments at the top of emacskeys.sco describe its function, and the emacstrs.sco is a suitable candidate for /usr/lib/keyboard/strings to take advantage of the keyboard map in emacskeys.sco. Note: Much of the above entry is probably not valid for XEmacs 21.0 and later. ** Cygwin *** In general use etc/check_cygwin_setup.sh to trap environment problems. The script etc/check_cygwin_setup.sh will attempt to detect whether you have a suitable environment for building. This script may not work correctly if you are using ash instead of bash (see below). *** Syntax errors running configure scripts, make failing with exit code 127 in inexplicable situations, etc. This may be because you are using the default cygwin shell. The default cygwin shell (/bin/sh.exe) is ash which appears to work in most circumstances but has some weird failure modes. You need to replace the symlink with bash.exe. *** Lots of compile errors, esp. on lines containing macro definitions terminated by backslashes. Your partition holding the source files is mounted binary. It needs to be mounted text. (This will not screw up any binary files because the Cygwin utilities specify explicitly whether they want binary or text mode when working with source vs. binary files, which overrides the mount type.) To fix this, you just need to run the appropriate mount command once -- afterwards, the settings are remembered in the registry. *** Errors from make like /c:not found. make sure you set the environment variable MAKE_MODE to UNIX in your .bashrc, Control Panel (Windows 2000/NT), or AUTOEXEC.BAT (Windows 98/95). *** X11 not detected. This is usually because xmkmf is not in your path or because you are using the default cygwin shell. The default cygwin shell (/bin/sh.exe) is ash which appears to work in most circumstances but has some weird failure modes. I recommend replacing sh.exe with bash.exe, this will mean configure is slower but more reliable. *** Subprocesses do not work. You do not have "tty" in your CYGWIN environment variable. This must be set in your autoexec.bat (win95) or the system properties (winnt) as it must be read before the cygwin DLL initializes. *** ^G does not work on hung subprocesses. This is a known problem. It can be remedied with cygwin b20 or greater by defining BROKEN_SIGIO in src/s/cygwin32.h, however this currently leads to instability in XEmacs. *** The info files will not build. makeinfo that ships with cygwin (all versions) is a noop. You need to obtain makeinfo from somewhere or build it yourself. *** I have no graphics. You need to obtain the various graphics libraries. Pre-built versions of these and the X libraries are located on the XEmacs website in ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/aux/cygwin/. *** There are no images in the toolbar buttons. You need version 4.71 of commctrl.dll which does not ship with windows 95. You can get this by installing IE 4.0 or downloading it from the microsoft website. * Problems with running XEmacs ============================== ** General *** XEmacs crashes mysteriously. Check whether XEmacs was configured --use-union-type. Many compilers are known to treat union types incompatibly with proper functioning of the Lisp_Object type. (Whether this is a compiler bug or nonstandard- conforming code in XEmacs is a moot point.) Especially with --with-mule, --pdump, and/or non-null --error-checking, this is known to produce an unreliable build with many versions of MS VC++ and GCC, and similar problems are likely to occur with other compilers. Symptoms are similar to garbage collection and other "wild pointer" bugs, ie, stack-smashing and other hard-to-debug crashes in unrelated code. Try reconfiguring and building without --use-union-type. --use-union-type _is_ useful to get improved _static_ type checking of Lisp objects. It is theoretically possible that it might help with aliasing bugs under optimization and improve runtime stability, but in practice exactly the opposite seems to be true. If you don't work on XEmacs C code directly, then avoid --use-union-type entirely for now. *** XEmacs crashes mysteriously in regexp-intensive applications (eg, Gnus) The regexp implementation used in XEmacs uses alloca by default for efficiency. alloca provides no reliable way to check for out of memory (in this case, stack). Normally not a problem, except for systems with very small default stack allocations, and applications that use multi-line regular expressions (ie, explicitly including ?\n) in moderately large files (> 100kB or so). You may get relief by increasing the amount of stack space allocated to your XEmacs process (a system-dependent operation, ask your administrator or local experts for help), or by recompiling the regexp module regex.c with REGEX_MALLOC defined, relinking, and redumping. *** At startup I get a warning on stderr about missing charsets: Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion You need to specify appropriate charsets for your locale (usually the value of the LANG environment variable) in .Xresources. See etc/Emacs.ad for the relevant resources (mostly menubar fonts and fontsets). Do not edit this file, it's purely informative. If you have no satisfactory fonts for iso-8859-1, XEmacs will crash. It looks like XFree86 4.x (the usual server on Linux and *BSD) has some braindamage where .UTF-8 locales will always generate this message, because the XFree86 (font)server doesn't know that UTF-8 will use the ISO10646-1 font registry (or a Cmap or something). If you are not using a .UTF-8 locale and see this warning for a character set not listed in the default in Emacs.ad, please let xemacs-beta@xemacs.org know about it, so we can add fonts to the appropriate fontsets and stifle this warning. (Unfortunately it's buried in Xlib, so we can't easily get rid of it otherwise.) *** Whenever I try to retrieve a remote file, I have problems. A typical error: FTP Error: USER request failed; 500 AUTH not understood. Thanks to giacomo boffi on comp.emacs.xemacs: tell your ftp client to not attempt AUTH authentication (or do not use FTP servers that don't understand AUTH) and notes that you need to add an element (often "-u") to `efs-ftp-program-args'. Use M-x customize-variable, and verify the needed flag with `man ftp' or other local documentation. *** gnuserv is running, some clients can connect, but others cannot. The code in gnuslib.c respects the value of TMPDIR. If the server and the client have different values in their environment, you lose. One program known to set TMPDIR and manifest this problem is exmh. You can defeat the use of TMPDIR by unsetting USE_TMPDIR at the top of gnuserv.h at build time. *** C-z just refreshes the screen instead of suspending Emacs. You are probably using a shell that doesn't support job control, even though the system itself is capable of it. Try using a different shell. *** You type Control-H (Backspace) expecting to delete characters. Emacs has traditionally used Control-H for help; unfortunately this interferes with its use as Backspace on TTY's. As of XEmacs 21, XEmacs looks at the "erase" setting of TTY structures and maps C-h to backspace when erase is set to C-h. This is sort of a special hack, but it makes it possible for you to use the standard: stty erase ^H to get your backspace key to erase characters. The erase setting is recorded in the Lisp variable `tty-erase-char', which you can use to tune the settings in your .emacs. A major drawback of this is that when C-h becomes backspace, it no longer invokes help. In that case, you need to use f1 for help, or bind another key. An example of the latter is the following code, which moves help to Meta-? (ESC ?): (global-set-key "\M-?" 'help-command) *** Mail agents (VM, Gnus, rmail) cannot get new mail rmail and VM get new mail from /usr/spool/mail/$USER using a program called `movemail'. This program interlocks with /bin/mail using the protocol defined by /bin/mail. There are two different protocols in general use. One of them uses the `flock' system call. The other involves creating a lock file; `movemail' must be able to write in /usr/spool/mail in order to do this. You control which one is used by defining, or not defining, the macro MAIL_USE_FLOCK in config.h or the m- or s- file it includes. IF YOU DON'T USE THE FORM OF INTERLOCKING THAT IS NORMAL ON YOUR SYSTEM, YOU CAN LOSE MAIL! If your system uses the lock file protocol, and fascist restrictions prevent ordinary users from writing the lock files in /usr/spool/mail, you may need to make `movemail' setgid to a suitable group such as `mail'. To do this, use the following commands (as root) after doing the make install. chgrp mail movemail chmod 2755 movemail Installation normally copies movemail from the build directory to an installation directory which is usually under /usr/local/lib. The installed copy of movemail is usually in the directory /usr/local/lib/emacs/VERSION/TARGET. You must change the group and mode of the installed copy; changing the group and mode of the build directory copy is ineffective. *** VM appears to hang in large folders. This is normal (trust us) when upgrading to VM-6.22 from earlier versions. Let VM finish what it is doing and all will be well. *** 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 changes will not be seen. To fix this, do `M-x byte-recompile-directory' and specify the directory that contains the Lisp files. Note that you will get a warning when loading a .elc file that is older than the corresponding .el file. *** Things which should be bold or italic (such as the initial copyright notice) are not. The fonts of the "bold" and "italic" faces are generated from the font of the "default" face; in this way, your bold and italic fonts will have the appropriate size and family. However, emacs can only be clever in this way if you have specified the default font using the XLFD (X Logical Font Description) format, which looks like *-courier-medium-r-*-*-*-120-*-*-*-*-*-* if you use any of the other, less strict font name formats, some of which look like: lucidasanstypewriter-12 and fixed and 9x13 then emacs won't be able to guess the names of the "bold" and "italic" versions. All X fonts can be referred to via XLFD-style names, so you should use those forms. See the man pages for X(1), xlsfonts(1), and xfontsel(1). *** 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 defined as a macro. If the definition (in both unexec.c and malloc.c) is wrong, it can cause problems like this. You might be able to find the correct value in the man page for a.out (5). 2) Some systems allocate variables declared static among the initialized variables. Emacs makes all initialized variables in most of its files pure after dumping, but the variables declared static and not initialized are not supposed to be pure. On these systems you may need to add "#define static" to the m- or the s- file. *** Reading and writing files is very very slow. Try evaluating the form (setq lock-directory nil) and see if that helps. There is a problem with file-locking on some systems (possibly related to NFS) that I don't understand. Please send mail to the address xemacs-beta@xemacs.org if you figure this one out. *** When emacs starts up, I get lots of warnings about unknown keysyms. If you are running the prebuilt binaries, the Motif library expects to find certain thing in the XKeysymDB file. This file is normally in /usr/lib/X11/ or in /usr/openwin/lib/. If you keep yours in a different place, set the environment variable $XKEYSYMDB to point to it before starting emacs. If you still have the problem after doing that, perhaps your version of X is too old. There is a copy of the MIT X11R5 XKeysymDB file in the emacs `etc' directory. Try using that one. *** My X resources used to work, and now some of them are being ignored. Check the resources in .../etc/Emacs.ad (which is the same as the file sample.Xdefaults). Perhaps some of the default resources built in to emacs are now overriding your existing resources. Copy and edit the resources in Emacs.ad as necessary. *** I have focus problems when I use `M-o' to switch to another screen without using the mouse. The focus issues with a program like XEmacs, which has multiple homogeneous top-level windows, are very complicated, and as a result, most window managers don't implement them correctly. The R4/R5 version of twm (and all of its descendants) had buggy focus handling. Sufficiently recent versions of tvtwm have been fixed. In addition, if you're using twm, make sure you have not specified "NoTitleFocus" in your .tvtwmrc file. The very nature of this option makes twm do some illegal focus tricks, even with the patch. It is known that olwm and olvwm are buggy, and in different ways. If you're using click-to-type mode, try using point-to-type, or vice versa. In older versions of NCDwm, one could not even type at XEmacs windows. This has been fixed in newer versions (2.4.3, and possibly earlier). (Many people suggest that XEmacs should warp the mouse when focusing on another screen in point-to-type mode. This is not ICCCM-compliant behavior. Implementing such policy is the responsibility of the window manager itself, it is not legal for a client to do this.) *** Emacs spontaneously displays "I-search: " at the bottom of the screen. This means that Control-S/Control-Q (XON/XOFF) "flow control" is being used. C-s/C-q flow control is bad for Emacs editors because it takes away C-s and C-q as user commands. Since editors do not output long streams of text without user commands, there is no need for a user-issuable "stop output" command in an editor; therefore, a properly designed flow control mechanism would transmit all possible input characters without interference. Designing such a mechanism is easy, for a person with at least half a brain. 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 responsible First of all, many terminals have a set-up mode which controls whether they generate XON/XOFF flow control characters. This must be set to "no XON/XOFF" in order for Emacs to work. Sometimes there is an escape sequence that the computer can send to turn flow control off and on. If so, perhaps the termcap `ti' string should turn flow control off, and the `te' string should turn it on. Once the terminal has been told "no flow control", you may find it needs more padding. The amount of padding Emacs sends is controlled by the termcap entry for the terminal in use, and by the output baud rate as known by the kernel. The shell command `stty' will print your output baud rate; `stty' with suitable arguments will set it if it is wrong. Setting to a higher speed causes increased padding. If the results are wrong for the correct speed, there is probably a problem in the termcap entry. You must speak to a local Unix wizard to fix this. Perhaps you are just using the wrong terminal type. For terminals that lack a "no flow control" mode, sometimes just giving lots of padding will prevent actual generation of flow control codes. You might as well try it. If you are really unlucky, your terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator which sends XON/XOFF flow control to the computer, or it insists on sending flow control itself no matter how much padding you give it. Unless you can figure out how to turn flow control off on this concentrator (again, refer to your local wizard), you are screwed! You should have the terminal or concentrator replaced with a properly designed one. In the mean time, some drastic measures can make Emacs semi-work. You can make Emacs ignore C-s and C-q and let the operating system handle them. To do this on a per-session basis, just type M-x enable-flow-control RET. You will see a message that C-\ and C-^ are now translated to C-s and C-q. (Use the same command M-x enable-flow-control to turn *off* this special mode. It toggles flow control handling.) If C-\ and C-^ are inconvenient for you (for example, if one of them is the escape character of your terminal concentrator), you can choose other characters by setting the variables flow-control-c-s-replacement and flow-control-c-q-replacement. But choose carefully, since all other control characters are already used by emacs. IMPORTANT: if you type C-s by accident while flow control is enabled, Emacs output will freeze, and you will have to remember to type C-q in order to continue. If you work in an environment where a majority of terminals of a certain type are flow control hobbled, you can use the function `enable-flow-control-on' to turn on this flow control avoidance scheme automatically. Here is an example: (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131") If this isn't quite correct (e.g. you have a mixture of flow-control hobbled and good vt200 terminals), you can still run enable-flow-control manually. I have no intention of ever redesigning the Emacs command set for the assumption that terminals use C-s/C-q flow control. XON/XOFF flow control technique is a bad design, and terminals that need it are bad merchandise and should not be purchased. Now that X is becoming widespread, XON/XOFF seems to be on the way out. If you can get some use out of GNU Emacs on inferior terminals, more power to you, but I will not make Emacs worse for properly designed systems for the sake of inferior systems. *** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely. For some reason, your system is using brain-damaged C-s/C-q flow control despite Emacs's attempts to turn it off. Perhaps your terminal is connected to the computer through a concentrator that wants to use flow control. You should first try to tell the concentrator not to use flow control. If you succeed in this, try making the terminal work without flow control, as described in the preceding section. If that line of approach is not successful, map some other characters into C-s and C-q using keyboard-translate-table. The example above shows how to do this with C-^ and C-\. *** Control-S and Control-Q commands are ignored completely on a net connection. Some versions of rlogin (and possibly telnet) do not pass flow control characters to the remote system to which they connect. On such systems, emacs on the remote system cannot disable flow control on the local system. One way to cure this is to disable flow control on the local host (the one running rlogin, not the one running rlogind) using the stty command, before starting the rlogin process. On many systems, `stty start u stop u' will do this. Some versions of tcsh will prevent even this from working. One way around this is to start another shell before starting rlogin, and issue the stty command to disable flow control from that shell. If none of these methods work, the best solution is to type `M-x enable-flow-control' at the beginning of your emacs session, or if you expect the problem to continue, add a line such as the following to your .emacs (on the host running rlogind): (enable-flow-control-on "vt200" "vt300" "vt101" "vt131") See the entry about spontaneous display of I-search (above) for more info. *** TTY redisplay is slow. XEmacs has fairly new TTY redisplay support (beginning from 19.12), which doesn't include some basic TTY optimizations -- like using scrolling regions to move around blocks of text. This is why redisplay on the traditional terminals, or over slow lines can be very slow. If you are interested in fixing this, please let us know at . *** Screen is updated wrong, but only on one kind of terminal. This could mean that the termcap entry you are using for that terminal is wrong, or it could mean that Emacs has a bug handing the combination of features specified for that terminal. The first step in tracking this down is to record what characters Emacs is sending to the terminal. Execute the Lisp expression (open-termscript "./emacs-script") to make Emacs write all terminal output into the file ~/emacs-script as well; then do what makes the screen update wrong, and look at the file and decode the characters using the manual for the terminal. There are several possibilities: 1) The characters sent are correct, according to the terminal manual. In this case, there is no obvious bug in Emacs, and most likely you need 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 for Emacs to distinguish between terminals with this kind of behavior and other terminals that behave subtly differently but are classified the same by termcap; or else find an algorithm for Emacs to use that avoids the difference. Such changes must be tested on many kinds of terminals. 3) The termcap entry is wrong. See the file etc/TERMS for information on changes that are known to be needed in commonly used termcap entries for 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 fixed in termcap.c, terminfo.c, tparam.c, cm.c, redisplay-tty.c, redisplay-output.c, or redisplay.c. *** My buffers are full of \000 characters or otherwise corrupt. Some compilers have trouble with gmalloc.c and ralloc.c; try recompiling without optimization. If that doesn't work, try recompiling with SYSTEM_MALLOC defined, and/or with REL_ALLOC undefined. *** 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 clents to request a position *** With M-x enable-flow-control, you need to type C-\ twice to 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 use another escape character in kermit. One user did set escape-character 17 in his .kermrc file, to make C-q the kermit escape character. *** 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 we do not yet know what. If it is an Emacs bug, we hope someone can explain what the bug is so we can fix it. In the mean time, removing the resource prevents the problem. *** After running emacs once, subsequent invocations crash. Some versions of SVR4 have a serious bug in the implementation of the mmap () system call in the kernel; this causes emacs to run correctly the first time, and then crash when run a second time. Contact your vendor and ask for the mmap bug fix; in the mean time, you may be able to work around the problem by adding a line to your operating system description file (whose name is reported by the configure script) that reads: #define SYSTEM_MALLOC This makes Emacs use memory less efficiently, but seems to work around the kernel bug. *** Inability to send an Alt-modified key, when Emacs is communicating directly with an X server. If you have tried to bind an Alt-modified key as a command, and it does not work to type the command, the first thing you should check is whether the key is getting through to Emacs. To do this, type C-h c followed by the Alt-modified key. C-h c should say what kind of event it read. If it says it read an Alt-modified key, then make sure you have made the key binding correctly. If C-h c reports an event that doesn't have the Alt modifier, it may be because your X server has no key for the Alt modifier. The X server that comes from MIT does not set up the Alt modifier by default. 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 those commands is needed. The modifier `mod2' is a reasonable choice if you are using an unmodified MIT version of X. Otherwise, choose any modifier bit not otherwise used. If your keyboard does not have keys named Alt, you can use some other keys. Use the keysym command in xmodmap to turn a function key (or some other 'spare' key) into Alt_L or into Alt_R, and then use the commands show above to make them modifier keys. Note that if you have Alt keys but no Meta keys, Emacs translates Alt into Meta. This is because of the great importance of Meta in Emacs. *** 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 too smart. It sees that the Shell uses terminal type `unknown' and turns on the flag to output ^M at the end of each line. You can fix the problem by adding this to your .cshrc file: if ($?EMACS) then if ($EMACS == "t") then unset edit stty -icrnl -onlcr -echo susp ^Z endif endif *** An error message such as `X protocol error: BadMatch (invalid parameter 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 something that isn't a color.) The fix is to correct your X resources. *** Once you pull down a menu from the menubar, it won't go away. It has been claimed that this is caused by a bug in certain very old (1990?) versions of the twm window manager. It doesn't happen with recent vintages, or with other window managers. *** Emacs ignores the "help" key when running OLWM. OLWM grabs the help key, and retransmits it to the appropriate client using XSendEvent. Allowing emacs to react to synthetic events is a security hole, so this is turned off by default. You can enable it by setting the variable x-allow-sendevents to t. You can also cause fix this by telling OLWM to not grab the help key, with the null binding "OpenWindows.KeyboardCommand.Help:". *** Programs running under terminal emulator do not recognize `emacs' terminal type. The cause of this is a shell startup file that sets the TERMCAP environment variable. The terminal emulator uses that variable to provide the information on the special terminal type that Emacs emulates. Rewrite your shell startup file so that it does not change TERMCAP in such a case. You could use the following conditional which sets it only if it is undefined. if ( ! ${?TERMCAP} ) setenv TERMCAP ~/my-termcap-file Or you could set TERMCAP only when you set TERM--which should not happen in a non-login shell. *** The popup menu appears at the bottom/right of my screen. You probably have something like the following in your ~/.Xdefaults Emacs.geometry: 81x56--9--1 Use the following instead Emacs*EmacsFrame.geometry: 81x56--9--1 ** MacOS/X, Darwin *** XEmacs crashes on MacOS within font-lock, or when dealing with large compilation buffers, or in other regex applications. The default stack size under MacOS/X is rather small (512k as opposed to Solaris 8M), hosing the regexp code, which uses alloca() extensively, overflowing the stack when complex regexps are used. Workarounds: 1) Increase your stack size, using `ulimit -s 8192' or a (t)csh equivalent; 2) Recompile regex.c with REGEX_MALLOC defined. ** AIX *** Your Delete key sends a Backspace to the terminal, using an AIXterm. The solution is to include in your .Xdefaults the lines: *aixterm.Translations: #override BackSpace: string(0x7f) aixterm*ttyModes: erase ^? This makes your Backspace key send DEL (ASCII 127). *** On AIX 4, some programs fail when run in a Shell buffer with 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 Terminal Definitions" to make them defined. *** On AIX, you get this message when running Emacs: Could not load program emacs Symbol smtcheckinit in csh is undefined Error was: Exec format error or 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 error These can happen when you try to run on AIX 3.2.5 a program that was compiled with 3.2.4. The fix is to recompile. *** Trouble using ptys on AIX. People often install the pty devices on AIX incorrectly. Use `smit pty' to reinstall them properly. ** SunOS/Solaris *** The Emacs window disappears when you type M-q. Some versions of the Open Look window manager interpret M-q as a quit command for whatever window you are typing at. If you want to use Emacs with that window manager, you should try to configure the window manager to use some other command. You can disable the shortcut keys entirely by adding this line to ~/.OWdefaults: OpenWindows.WindowMenuAccelerators: False *** When Emacs tries to ring the bell, you get an error like audio: sst_open: SETQSIZE" Invalid argument audio: sst_close: SETREG MMR2, Invalid argument you have probably compiled using an ANSI C compiler, but with non-ANSI include files. In particular, on Suns, the file /usr/include/sun/audioio.h uses the _IOW macro to define the constant AUDIOSETQSIZE. _IOW in turn uses a K&R preprocessor feature that is now explicitly forbidden in ANSI preprocessors, namely substitution inside character constants. All ANSI C compilers must provide a workaround for this problem. Lucid's C compiler is shipped with a new set of system include files. If you are using GCC, there is a script called fixincludes that creates new versions of some system include files that use this obsolete feature. *** On Solaris 2.6, XEmacs dumps core when exiting. This happens if you're XEmacs is running on the same machine as the X server, and the optimized memory transport has been turned on by setting the environment variable XSUNTRANSPORT. The crash occurs during the call to XCloseDisplay. If this describes your situation, you need to undefine the XSUNTRANSPORT environment variable. *** 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-r C-r C-t, to toggle whether C-x gets through to Emacs. *** On Solaris 2.4, Dired hangs and C-g does not work. Or Emacs hangs forever waiting for termination of a subprocess that is a zombie. casper@fwi.uva.nl says the problem is in X11R6. Rebuild libX11.so after changing the file xc/config/cf/sunLib.tmpl. Change the lines #if ThreadedX #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread #endif to: #if OSMinorVersion < 4 #if ThreadedX #define SharedX11Reqs -lthread #endif #endif Be sure also to edit x/config/cf/sun.cf so that OSMinorVersion is 4 (as it should be for Solaris 2.4). The file has three definitions for OSMinorVersion: the first is for x86, the second for SPARC under Solaris, and the third for SunOS 4. Make sure to update the definition for your type of machine and system. Then do `make Everything' in the top directory of X11R6, to rebuild the makefiles and rebuild X. The X built this way work only on Solaris 2.4, not on 2.3. For multithreaded X to work it necessary to install patch 101925-02 to fix problems in header files [2.4]. You need to reinstall gcc or re-run just-fixinc after installing that patch. However, Frank Rust used a simpler solution: he changed #define ThreadedX YES to #define ThreadedX NO in sun.cf and did `make World' to rebuild X11R6. Removing all `-DXTHREAD*' flags and `-lthread' entries from lib/X11/Makefile and typing 'make install' in that directory also seemed to work. *** On 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 precise version number (or let configure figure out the configuration, which it can do perfectly well for SunOS). *** Mail is lost when sent to local aliases. Many emacs mail user agents (VM and rmail, for instance) use the sendmail.el library. This library can arrange for mail to be delivered by passing messages to the /usr/lib/sendmail (usually) program . In doing so, it passes the '-t' flag to sendmail, which means that the name of the recipient of the message is not on the command line and, therefore, that sendmail must parse the message to obtain the destination address. There is a bug in the SunOS4.1.1 and SunOS4.1.3 versions of sendmail. In short, when given the -t flag, the SunOS sendmail won't recognize non-local (i.e. NIS) aliases. It has been reported that the Solaris 2.x versions of sendmail do not have this bug. For those using SunOS 4.1, the best fix is to install sendmail V8 or IDA sendmail (which have other advantages over the regular sendmail as well). At the time of this writing, these official versions are available: 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 *** Emacs fails to understand most Internet host names, even though the names work properly with other programs on the same system. Emacs won't work with X-windows if the value of DISPLAY is HOSTNAME:0. Gnus can't make contact with the specified host for nntp. This typically happens on Suns and other systems that use shared libraries. The cause is that the site has installed a version of the shared library which uses a name server--but has not installed a similar version of the unshared library which Emacs uses. The result is that most programs, using the shared library, work with the nameserver, but Emacs does not. The fix is to install an unshared library that corresponds to what you installed 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 to do this is to add to config.h a definition of LIBS_SYSTEM, LIBS_MACHINE or LIB_STANDARD which uses -lresolv. Watch out! If you redefine a macro that is already in use in your configuration to supply some other libraries, be careful not to lose the others. Thus, you could start by adding this to config.h: #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv Then if this gives you an error for redefining a macro, and you see that the s- file defines LIBS_SYSTEM as -lfoo -lbar, you could change config.h again to say this: #define LIBS_SYSTEM -lresolv -lfoo -lbar *** With process-connection-type set to t, each line of subprocess output is terminated with a ^M, making ange-ftp and GNUS not work. On SunOS systems, this problem has been seen to be a result of an incomplete installation of gcc 2.2 which allowed some non-ANSI compatible include files into the compilation. In particular this affected virtually all ioctl() calls. ** Linux *** XEmacs crashes on exit. This is known to happen with Lesstif version 0.93.36. It is apparently due to breakage in Lesstif. There is a patch for Lesstif. Frank McIngvale says: Ok, 0.93.34 works, and I tracked down the crash to a section marked "experimental" in 0.93.36. Patch attached, "works for me". diff -u -r lesstif-0.93.36/lib/Xm/ImageCache.c lesstif-0.93.36-mod/lib/Xm/ImageCache.c --- lesstif-0.93.36/lib/Xm/ImageCache.c 2002-08-05 14:53:24.000000000 -0500 +++ lesstif-0.93.36-mod/lib/Xm/ImageCache.c 2002-11-11 11:13:12.000000000 -0600 @@ -1166,5 +1166,4 @@ DEBUGOUT(_LtDebug0(__FILE__, NULL, "_LtImageCacheScreenDestroy (XmGetPixmapByDepth) %p\n", s)); - (void) _LTHashTableForEachItem(PixmapCache, YowIter, (XtPointer)s); } *** XEmacs crashes on startup, in make-frame. Typically the Lisp backtrace includes make-frame(nil #) somewhere near the top. One problem is due to an improvement in GNU ld that sorts the ELF reloc sections in the executable, giving dramatic speedups in startup for large executables. It also confuses the traditional unexec code in XEmacs, leading to the core dump. The solution is to use either the `--ldflags="-z nocombreloc" or the "--pdump" option to configure. "--pdump" is recommended. Recent 21.4 and 21.5 versions of XEmacs autodetect this feature of ld in configure. Unfortunately, Red Hat and SuSE (at least) distributed prerelease versions of ld (numbered around 2.11.90.x.y, nicknamed "Hannibal Lecter" at XEmacs.ORG) where autodetection fails but the feature is enabled by default. The recommended procedure is to upgrade to binutils >= 2.12 and rerun configure. Otherwise you must apply the flags by hand. Andrew Jaffe reported a problem on Red Hat 7.3 with identical symptoms, except that ld was already being invoked with -z nocombreloc. Switching dialogs and widgets from Motif to Athena eliminated the problem. Both LessTif and OpenMotif were installed, and a bad interaction is suspected. This problem has not yet been fully analyzed. *** Debian **** XEmacs warns "Symbol `toggleClassRec' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking / Symbol `labelClassRec' has different size in shared object, consider re-linking / Warning: Representation size 4 must match superclass's to override value" Sometimes this results in segfaults when using the tab control widget or a progress bar widget. Some versions of Debian install 3D versions of the Athena widget library as /usr/X11R6/lib/libXaw.so. We have not yet solved the problem of identifying the actual library in use in ./configure, so it is possible for XEmacs to be compiled with reference to headers for "flat" Xaw but find a "3D" Xaw when loading. The straightforward solution is to rebuild XEmacs with additional configure options: --with-widgets=athena --with-athena=3d. There are several 3D Athena widget sets available; to see which ones are supported by XEmacs, use ./configure --usage. *** Mandrake The Mandrake Linux distribution is attempting to comprehensively update the user interface, and make it consistent across applications. This is very difficult, and will occasionally cause conflicts with applications like Emacs with their own long-established interfaces. Known issues specific to Mandrake or especially common: Some versions of XEmacs (21.1.9 is known) distributed with Mandrake were patched to make the Meta and Alt keysyms synonymous. These normally work as expected in the Mandrake environment. However, custom-built XEmacsen (including all 21.2 betas) will "inexplicably" not respect the "Alt-invokes-Meta-commands" convention. See "I want XEmacs to use the Alt key" below. The color-gcc wrapper (see below) is in common use on the Mandrake platform. *** XEmacs configured with ESD crashes with a segmentation violation This often occurs when a progress bar pops up. The problem is that the ESD sound daemon manipulates interrupts in a way that disagrees with XEmacs. The currently available workaround is not very satisfactory: remove ESD support. Rebuild after reconfiguring with the option --with-sound=none[,native][,nas] The funny syntax (requiring the initial "none") is for backward compatibility, and may change. Native sound and NAS do not cause the problem, so they may be added to the option to get some sound support. *** I want XEmacs to use the Alt key, not the XXX key, for Meta commands For historical reasons, XEmacs looks for a Meta key, then an Alt key. It binds Meta commands to the X11 modifier bit attached to the first of these it finds. On PCs, the Windows key is often assigned the Meta bit, but many desktop environments go to great lengths to get all apps to use the Alt key, and reserve the Windows key to (sensibly enough) the window manager. One correct way to implement this was suggested on comp.emacs.xemacs (by Kilian Foth and in more detail by Michael Piotrowski): unmap the Meta modifier using xmodmap or xkb, and then map the Meta/Windows key to the Super or Hyper keysym and an appropriate mod bit. XEmacs will not find the Meta keysym, and default to using the Alt key for Meta keybindings. Typically few applications use the (X11) Meta modifier; it is tedious but not too much so to teach the ones you need to use Super instead of Meta. There may be further useful hints in the discussion of keymapping on non-Linux platforms. *** The color-gcc wrapper This wrapper colorizes the error messages from gcc. By default XEmacs does not interpret the escape sequences used to generate colors, resulting in a cluttered, hard-to-read buffer. You can remove the wrapper, or defeat the wrapper colorization in Emacs process buffers by editing the "nocolor" attribute in /etc/colorgccrc: $ diff -u /etc/colorgccrc.old /etc/colorgccrc --- /etc/colorgccrc.old Tue Dec 26 02:17:46 2000 +++ /etc/colorgccrc Tue Dec 26 02:15:48 2000 @@ -34,1 +34,1 @@ -nocolor: dumb +nocolor: dumb emacs If you want colorization in your Emacs buffers, you may get good results from the ansi-color.el library: http://www.geocities.com/kensanata/color-emacs.html#ansicolors This is written for the mainline GNU Emacs but the author has made efforts to adapt it to XEmacs. YMMV. *** Slow startup on Linux. People using systems based on the Linux kernel sometimes report that startup takes 10 to 15 seconds longer than `usual'. There are two problems, one older, one newer. **** Old problem: IPv4 host lookup On older systems, this is because Emacs looks up the host name when it starts. Normally, this takes negligible time; the extra delay is due to improper system configuration. (Recent Linux distros usually have this configuration correct "out of the box".) This problem can occur for both networked 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' both exist. The first line in the `/etc/hosts' file should look like this (replace HOSTNAME with your host name): 127.0.0.1 localhost HOSTNAME Also make sure that the `/etc/host.conf' files contains the following lines: order hosts, bind multi on Any changes, permanent and temporary, to the host name should be indicated in the `/etc/hosts' file, since it acts a limited local database of addresses and names (e.g., some SLIP connections dynamically allocate ip addresses). ***** 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 a simpler solution: create an empty `/etc/host.conf' file. The command `touch /etc/host.conf' suffices to create the file. The `/etc/hosts' file is not necessary with this approach. **** New problem: IPv6 CNAME lookup A newer problem is due to XEmacs changing to use the modern getaddrinfo() interface from the older gethostbyname() interface. The solution above is insufficient, because getaddrinfo() by default tries to get IPv6 information for localhost (including the local X server). This always involves a dns lookup to get the CNAME, and the strategies above don't work. It then falls back to IPv4 behavior. ***** Robust network case Configure your network so that there are no nameservers configured until the network is actually running. getaddrinfo() will not try to access a nameserver that isn't configured. ***** Flaky network case If you have a flaky modem or DSL connection that can be relied on only to go down whenever you want to bring XEmacs up, you need to force IPv4 behavior. Explicitly setting DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0 (or whatever is appropriate) works in most cases. If you cannot or do not want to do that, you can hard code IPv4 behavior in src/process-unix.c. Add `--with-ipv6-cname=no" to your configure options and rebuild XEmacs. *** XEmacs disappears after several sound events in succession If esd is not running (e.g. you unchecked the run esd checkbox in the GNOME Configuration tool), every sound event will cause the esound client library to signal SIGUSR1. It is not that difficult (hold down PgUp or PgDn, for example) to cause XEmacs to generate additional SIGUSR1 signals before the first handler has a chance to reset, so the second SIGUSR1 causes the default behavior of ending the process. The solution is either to build XEmacs with -sound=native,noesd or to make sure that esd is in fact running. *** You get crashes in a non-C locale with Linux GNU Libc 2.0. Internationalization was not the top priority for GNU Libc 2.0. As of this writing (1998-12-28) you may get crashes while running XEmacs in a non-C locale. For example, `LC_ALL=en_US xemacs' crashes while `LC_ALL=C xemacs' runs fine. This happens for example with GNU libc 2.0.7. Installing libintl.a and libintl.h built from gettext 0.10.35 and re-building XEmacs solves the crashes. Presumably soon everyone will upgrade to GNU Libc 2.1 and this problem will go away. *** `C-z', or `M-x suspend-emacs' hangs instead of suspending. If you build with `gpm' support on Linux, you cannot suspend XEmacs because gpm installs a buggy SIGTSTP handler. Either compile with `--with-gpm=no', or don't suspend XEmacs on the Linux console until this bug is fixed. *** With certain fonts, when the cursor appears on a character, the character doesn't appear--you get a solid box instead. One user on a Linux system reported that this problem went away with installation of a new X server. The failing server was XFree86 3.1.1. XFree86 3.1.2 works. ** IRIX *** On Irix, I don't see the toolbar icons and I'm getting lots of entries in the warnings buffer. SGI ships a really old Xpm library in /usr/lib which does not work at all well with XEmacs. The solution is to install your own copy of the latest version of Xpm somewhere and then use the --site-includes and --site-libraries flags to tell configure where to find it. *** Trouble using ptys on IRIX, or running out of ptys. The program mkpts (which may be in `/usr/adm' or `/usr/sbin') needs to be set-UID to root, or non-root programs like Emacs will not be able to allocate ptys reliably. *** Motif dialog boxes lose on Irix. Larry Auton writes: Beware of not specifying --with-dialogs=athena if it builds with the motif dialogs [boom!] you're a dead man. *** Beware of the default image & graphics library on Irix Richard Cognot writes: You *have* to compile your own jpeg lib. The one delivered with SGI systems is a C++ lib, which apparently XEmacs cannot cope with. ** Digital UNIX/OSF/VMS/Ultrix *** XEmacs crashes on Digital Unix within font-lock, or when dealing with large compilation buffers, or in other regex applications. The default stack size under Digital Unix is rather small (2M as opposed to Solaris 8M), hosing the regexp code, which uses alloca() extensively, overflowing the stack when complex regexps are used. Workarounds: 1) Increase your stack size, using `ulimit -s 8192' or a (t)csh equivalent; 2) Recompile regex.c with REGEX_MALLOC defined. *** The `Alt' key doesn't behave as `Meta' when running DECwindows. The default DEC keyboard mapping has the Alt keys set up to generate the keysym `Multi_key', which has a meaning to xemacs which is distinct from that of the `Meta_L' and `Meta-R' keysyms. A second problem is that certain keys have the Mod2 modifier attached to them for no adequately explored reason. The correct fix is to pass this file to xmodmap upon starting X: clear mod2 keysym Multi_key = Alt_L add mod1 = Alt_L add mod1 = Alt_R *** 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' *** `expand-file-name' fails to work on any but the machine you dumped Emacs on. On Ultrix, if you use any of the functions which look up information in the passwd database before dumping Emacs (say, by using expand-file-name in site-init.el), then those functions will not work in the dumped Emacs on any host but the one Emacs was dumped on. The solution? Don't use expand-file-name in site-init.el, or in anything it loads. Yuck - some solution. I'm not sure why this happens; if you can find out exactly what is going on, and perhaps find a fix or a workaround, please let us know. Perhaps the YP functions cache some information, the cache is included in the dumped Emacs, and is then inaccurate on any other host. ** HP-UX *** I get complaints about the mapping of my HP keyboard at startup, but I haven't changed anything. The default HP keymap is set up to have Mod1 assigned to two different keys: Meta_L and Mode_switch (even though there is not actually a Mode_switch key on the keyboard -- it uses an "imaginary" keycode.) There actually is a reason for this, but it's not a good one. The correct fix is to execute this command upon starting X: xmodmap -e 'remove mod1 = Mode_switch' *** On HP-UX, you get "poll: Interrupted system call" message in the window where XEmacs was launched. Richard Cognot writes: I get a very strange problem when linking libc.a dynamically: every event (mouse, keyboard, expose...) results in a "poll: Interrupted system call" message in the window where XEmacs was launched. Forcing a static link of libc.a alone by adding /usr/lib/libc.a at the end of the link line solves this. Note that my 9.07 build of 19.14b17 and my (old) build of 19.13 both exhibit the same behavior. I've tried various hpux patches to no avail. If this problem cannot be solved before the release date, binary kits for HP *must* be linked statically against libc, otherwise this problem will show up. (This is directed at whoever will volunteer for this kit, as I won't be available to do it, unless 19.14 gets delayed until mid-june ;-). I think this problem will be an FAQ soon after the release otherwise. Note: The above entry is probably not valid for XEmacs 21.0 and later. *** The right Alt key works wrong on German HP keyboards (and perhaps other non-English HP keyboards too). This is because HP-UX defines the modifiers wrong in X. Here is a shell script to fix the problem; be sure that it is run after VUE configures the X server. 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 *** XEmacs dumps core at startup when native audio is used. Native audio does not work with recent versions of HP-UX. Under HP-UX 10.20 and later (e.g., HP-UX 11.XX), with native audio enabled, the dumped XEmacs binary ("xemacs") core dumps at startup if recent versions of the libAlib.sl audio shared library is used. Note that "temacs" will run, but "xemacs" will dump core. This, of course, causes the XEmacs build to fail. If GNU malloc is enabled, a stack trace will show XEmacs to have crashed in the "first" call to malloc(). This bug currently exists in all versions of XEmacs, when the undump mechanism is used. It is not known if using the experimental portable dumper will allow native audio to work. **** Cause: Recent versions of the HP-UX 10.20 (and later) audio shared library (in /opt/audio/lib), pulls in the libdce shared library, which pulls in a thread (libcma) library. This prevents the HP-UX undump() routine (in unexhp9k800.c) from properly working. What's happening is that some initialization routines are being called in the libcma library, *BEFORE* main() is called, and these initialization routines are calling malloc(). Unfortunately, in order for the undumper to work, XEmacs must adjust (move upwards) the sbrk() value *BEFORE* the first call to malloc(); if malloc() is called before XEmacs has properly adjusted sbrk (which is what is happening), dumped memory that is being used by XEmacs, is improperly re-allocated for use by malloc() and the dumped memory is corrupted. This causes XEmacs to die an horrible death. It is believed that versions of the audio library past December 1998 will trigger this problem. Under HP-UX 10.20, you probably have to install audio library patches to encounter this. It's probable that recent "fresh, out-of-the-box" HP-UX 11.XX workstations also have this problem. For HP-UX 10.20, it's believed that audio patch PHSS_17121 (or a superceeding one, like PHSS_17554, PHSS_17971, PHSS_18777, PHSS_21481, or PHSS_21662, etc.) will trigger this. To check if your audio library will cause problems for XEmacs, run "chatr /opt/audio/lib/libAlib.sl". If "libdce" appears in the displayed shared library list, XEmacs will probably encounter problems if audio is enabled. **** Workaround: Don't enable native audio. Re-run configure without native audio support. If your site supports it, try using NAS (Network Audio Support). Try using the experimental portable dumper. It may work, or it may not. *** `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 NFS file system. HP-UX responds this way if it tries to swap in a page and does not get a response from the server within a timeout whose default value is just ten seconds. If this happens to you, extend the timeout period. *** Shell mode on HP-UX gives the message, "`tty`: Ambiguous". christos@theory.tn.cornell.edu says: The problem is that in your .cshrc you have something that tries to execute `tty`. If you are not running the shell on a real tty then tty will print "not a tty". Csh expects one word in some places, but tty is giving it back 3. The solution is to add a pair of quotes around `tty` to make it a single word: if (`tty` == "/dev/console") should be changed to: if ("`tty`" == "/dev/console") Even better, move things that set up terminal sections out of .cshrc and into .login. ** SCO *** Regular expressions matching bugs on SCO systems. On SCO, there are problems in regexp matching when Emacs is compiled with the system compiler. The compiler version is "Microsoft C version 6", SCO 4.2.0h Dev Sys Maintenance Supplement 01/06/93; Quick C Compiler Version 1.00.46 (Beta). The solution is to compile with GCC. ** Windows *** In general, the Windows code is less mature than the Unix code. The Windows code base is still changing quickly. If you are experiencing problems, try the latest beta version to see if the problem still exists. Also ask on xemacs-nt@xemacs.org. ** Cygwin *** XEmacs fails to start because cygXpm-noX4.dll was not found. Andy Piper sez: cygXpm-noX4 is part of the cygwin distribution under libraries or graphics, but is not installed by default. You need to run the cygwin setup again and select this package. *** Subprocesses do not work. You do not have "tty" in your CYGWIN environment variable. This must be set in your autoexec.bat (win95) or the system properties (winnt) as it must be read before the cygwin DLL initializes. *** ^G does not work on hung subprocesses. This is a known problem. It can be remedied by defining BROKEN_SIGIO in src/s/cygwin.h, however this currently leads to instability in XEmacs. (#### is this still true?) *** Errors from make like `/c:not found' when running `M-x compile'. Make sure you set the environment variable MAKE_MODE to UNIX in your init file (.xemacs/init.el), Control Panel (Windows 2000/NT), or AUTOEXEC.BAT (Windows 98/95). *** There are no images in the toolbar buttons. You need version 4.71 of commctrl.dll which does not ship with windows 95. You can get this by installing IE 4.0 or downloading it from the microsoft website. * Compatibility problems (with Emacs 18, GNU Emacs, or previous XEmacs/lemacs) ============================================================================== *** "Symbol's value as variable is void: unread-command-char". "Wrong type argument: arrayp, #" "Wrong type argument: stringp, [#]" There are a few incompatible changes in XEmacs, and these are the symptoms. Some of the emacs-lisp code you are running needs to be updated to be compatible with XEmacs. The code should not treat keymaps as arrays (use `define-key', etc.), should not use obsolete variables like `unread-command-char' (use `unread-command-events'). Many (most) of the new ways of doing things are compatible in GNU Emacs and XEmacs. Modern Emacs packages (Gnus, VM, W3, efs, etc) are written to support GNU Emacs and XEmacs. We have provided modified versions of several popular emacs packages (dired, etc) which are compatible with this version of emacs. Check to make sure you have not set your load-path so that your private copies of these packages are being found before the versions in the lisp directory. Make sure that your load-path and your $EMACSLOADPATH environment variable are not pointing at an Emacs18 lisp directory. This will cripple emacs. ** Some packages that worked before now cause the error Wrong type argument: arrayp, # Code which uses the `face' accessor functions must be recompiled with xemacs 19.9 or later. The functions whose callers must be recompiled are: face-font, face-foreground, face-background, face-background-pixmap, and face-underline-p. The .elc files generated by version 19.9 will work in 19.6 and 19.8, but older .elc files which contain calls to these functions will not work in 19.9. ** Signaling: (error "Byte code stack underflow (byte compiler bug), pc 38") This error is given when XEmacs 20 is compiled without MULE support but is attempting to load a .elc which requires MULE support. The fix is to rebytecompile the offending file. ** Signaling: (wrong-type-argument ...) when loading mail-abbrevs The is seen when installing the Insidious Big Brother Data Base (bbdb) which includes an outdated copy of mail-abbrevs.el. Remove the copy that comes with bbdb and use the one that comes with XEmacs. * MULE issues ============= ** A reminder: XEmacs/Mule work does not currently receive *any* funding, and all work is done by volunteers. If you think you can help, please contact the XEmacs maintainers. ** XEmacs/Mule doesn't support TTY's satisfactorily. This is a major problem, which we plan to address in a future release of XEmacs. Basically, XEmacs should have primitives to be told whether the terminal can handle international output, and which locale. Also, it should be able to do approximations of characters to the nearest supported by the locale. ** Internationalized (Asian) Isearch doesn't work. Currently, Isearch doesn't directly support any of the input methods that are not XIM based (like egg, canna and quail) (and there are potential problems with XIM version too...). If you're using egg there is a workaround. Hitting right after C-s to invoke Isearch will put Isearch in string mode, where a complete string can be typed into the minibuffer and then processed by Isearch afterwards. Since egg is now supported in the minibuffer using string mode you can now use egg to input your Japanese, Korean or Chinese string, then hit return to send that to Isearch and then use standard Isearch commands from there. ** Using egg and mousing around while in 'fence' mode screws up my buffer. Don't do this. The fence modes of egg and canna are currently very modal, and messing with where they expect point to be and what they think is the current buffer is just asking for trouble. If you're lucky they will realize that something is awry, and simply delete the fence, but worst case can trash other buffers too. We've tried to protect against this where we can, but there still are many ways to shoot yourself in the foot. So just finish what you are typing into the fence before reaching for the mouse. ** Not all languages in Quail are supported like Devanagari and Indian languages, Lao and Tibetan. Quail requires more work and testing. Although it has been ported to XEmacs, it works really well for Japanese and for the European languages. ** Right-to-left mode is not yet implemented, so languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Thai don't work. Getting this right requires more work. It may be implemented in a future XEmacs version, but don't hold your breath. If you know someone who is ready to implement this, please let us know. ** We need more developers and native language testers. It's extremely difficult (and not particularly productive) to address languages that nobody is using and testing. ** The kWnn and cWnn support for Chinese and Korean needs developers and testers. It probably doesn't work. ** There are no `native XEmacs' TUTORIALs for any Asian languages, including Japanese. FSF Emacs and XEmacs tutorials are quite similar, so it should be sufficient to skim through the differences and apply them to the Japanese version. ** We only have localized menus translated for Japanese, and the Japanese menus are developing bitrot (the Mule menu appears in English). ** XIM is untested for any language other than Japanese.