HOWTO: Install GNU Emacs with antialiasing

[Lux Perpetua]

Neat! Everything went without a hitch...except the newly installed Emacs shows a graphical bug that causes its window not to be redrawn properly, making it unusable (although wherever text appears, it is clearly antialiased). At this point, I should embarrassingly admit that I'm still running Hoary, so I probably have no right to complain. However, has anyone else experienced this, or does anyone know more specifically what the cause might be?

[Manny C]

Neat! Everything went without a hitch...except the newly installed Emacs shows a graphical bug that causes its window not to be redrawn properly, making it unusable (although wherever text appears, it is clearly antialiased). At this point, I should embarrassingly admit that I'm still running Hoary, so I probably have no right to complain. However, has anyone else experienced this, or does anyone know more specifically what the cause might be?

Be embarrased...and I don't your problem on Breezy...dammit, dapper is nearly out.

[Mr_Smiley]

Hi,

Just followed through the instructions and it seemed to install ok. However when I try and run emacs I get this message:

emacs: Cannot open termcap database file

Thanks for any help.

EDIT: Well I managed to fix the problem by installing 'libncurses5-dev' and then recompiling emacs however I now have another problem. When starting emacs it loads the console version. Any ideas why?

Thanks.

[Zed]

Thanks for the HOWTO; Emacs looks great without having to run it in console mode in an xfce4-terminal.

Is there any way to convince apt (& friends) that this is an acceptable alternative to the emacs21 packages such that one could install auctex, or other things that have emacs21 packages as dependencies? (Yes, I know there may be incompatibilities and weirdness and that it would be all my fault.)

[Lux Perpetua]

Hi,

Just followed through the instructions and it seemed to install ok. However when I try and run emacs I get this message:

emacs: Cannot open termcap database file

Thanks for any help.

EDIT: Well I managed to fix the problem by installing 'libncurses5-dev' and then recompiling emacs however I now have another problem. When starting emacs it loads the console version. Any ideas why?

Thanks.

I had the same problem initially, and I managed to fix it (on both Breezy and Dapper). I think it just didn't configure correctly. (libncurses-dev should be irrelevant to this thread, since we want Emacs to use GTK and XFT, let alone curses )

1. First, install libgtk2.0-dev from Synaptic or apt-get.

2. If you try to follow the procedure now, it might work...but it didn't for me. Actually, make bootstrap failed, with gcc reporting syntax errors in a header file (apparently due to some un-kosher macro expansion). If this happens to you, you might try the following inelegant, hack-ish solution (read: no guarantees implied whatsoever): fire up a text editor (like gedit, if you don't have another Emacs) and open the file emacs/configure. Find the following section:

if test "$have_x" != yes; then
  echo "$as_me:$LINENO: result: $have_x" >&5
echo "${ECHO_T}$have_x" >&6
  no_x=yes
else
  # If each of the values was on the command line, it overrides each guess.
  test "x$x_includes" = xNONE && x_includes=$ac_x_includes
  test "x$x_libraries" = xNONE && x_libraries=$ac_x_libraries
  # Update the cache value to reflect the command line values.
  ac_cv_have_x="have_x=yes \
		ac_x_includes=$x_includes ac_x_libraries=$x_libraries"
  echo "$as_me:$LINENO: result: libraries $x_libraries, headers $x_includes" >&5
echo "${ECHO_T}libraries $x_libraries, headers $x_includes" >&6
fi

Exchange the lines "no_x=yes" and "else", so that the section looks like this:

if test "$have_x" != yes; then
  echo "$as_me:$LINENO: result: $have_x" >&5
echo "${ECHO_T}$have_x" >&6
else
  no_x=yes
  # If each of the values was on the command line, it overrides each guess.
  test "x$x_includes" = xNONE && x_includes=$ac_x_includes
  test "x$x_libraries" = xNONE && x_libraries=$ac_x_libraries
  # Update the cache value to reflect the command line values.
  ac_cv_have_x="have_x=yes \
		ac_x_includes=$x_includes ac_x_libraries=$x_libraries"
  echo "$as_me:$LINENO: result: libraries $x_libraries, headers $x_includes" >&5
echo "${ECHO_T}libraries $x_libraries, headers $x_includes" >&6
fi

Now repeat the compilation process, starting from the ./configure step. I don't know if it is actually a bug in the script or it is just a fluke that switching the two lines made it compile and run on my machine

3. I haven't confirmed this, but I think there is a chance that

./configure --with-x-toolkit=gtk --with-xft=yes

won't configure properly, but this:

./configure --with-gtk --with-xft

did work for me. Something else to try.

(And the display problem I reported earlier doesn't appear when compiling on Breezy and Dapper.)

Thanks you, trevorv, for this howto. Finally, antialiased Emacs!

[yigal.weinstein]

Another (probably newbie) issue is installing additions to emacs after installation through this method. Synaptic i.e. apt-get doesn't register it as being installed because it wasn't installed via a .deb package so how to add additions? I have no clue.

[thermans]

Neat! Everything went without a hitch...except the newly installed Emacs shows a graphical bug that causes its window not to be redrawn properly, making it unusable (although wherever text appears, it is clearly antialiased). At this point, I should embarrassingly admit that I'm still running Hoary, so I probably have no right to complain. However, has anyone else experienced this, or does anyone know more specifically what the cause might be?

I don't think it has anything to do with Hoary. I'm on Dapper and have redraw problems:



Not sure what the cause is.

[thermans]

Another (probably newbie) issue is installing additions to emacs after installation through this method. Synaptic i.e. apt-get doesn't register it as being installed because it wasn't installed via a .deb package so how to add additions? I have no clue.

You can do the following to build .debs for the build. Then you can install them in a way Synaptic will understand:

Add the following to "emacs/debian/rules":

emacs_gtk_confflags += --with-xft=yes

to the "Emacs-gtk confflags" section (round about line 754 of the file).

Now instead of doing "make; make install" and all that jazz do:

fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -nc -b

When it's done you will have .deb files that you can install with "dpkg -i".

I got this from here (although note the additional argument to the buildpackage command)

[thermans]

Another way to do it, possibly easier:

Build emacs like trevorv says in the original post. But do the "configure" like this:

./configure --with-gtk --with-xft --prefix=/usr

Also do NOT do the "sudo make install" part.

Now install the emacs-snapshot packages like this:

sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-common
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-el
sudo apt-get install emacs-snapshot-gtk

Then copy the new binary over the one you just installed:

install -b emacs/src/gtk-emacs /usr/bin/emacs

You'll have to remember to replace it each time you upgrade the snapshot, but this should work just fine.

[yigal.weinstein]

Everything is here:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsCvsAndDebian