GNU Emacs Installation Guide for the DJGPP (a.k.a. MS-DOS) port Copyright (C) 1992, 1994, 1996-1997, 2000-2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for license conditions. The DJGPP port of GNU Emacs builds and runs on all versions of MS-Windows from version 3.X on, including Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (however, see below for issues with Windows Vista and 7). Building on plain MS-DOS is supported only if long file names are supported (e.g., with a specialized driver such as doslfn). To build and install the DJGPP port, you need to have the DJGPP ports of GCC (the GNU C compiler), GNU Make, rm, mv, cp, and sed, and version 2.02 or later of DJGPP itself. See the remarks in CONFIG.BAT for more information about locations and versions. The Emacs FAQ (see info/efaq.info) includes pointers to Internet sites where you can find the necessary utilities; search for "MS-DOS". The configuration step (see below) will test for these utilities and will refuse to continue if any of them isn't found. Bootstrapping Emacs or recompiling Lisp files in the `lisp' subdirectory using the various targets in the lisp/Makefile file requires additional utilities: `find' (from Findutils), GNU `echo' and `test' (from Sh-utils or Coreutils), `ls' and `chmod' (from Fileutils or Coreutils), `grep' (from Grep), and a port of Bash. However, you should not normally need to run lisp/Makefile, as all the Lisp files are distributed in byte-compiled form as well. As for bootstrapping itself, you will only need that if you check-out development sources from the Emacs source repository. Building the DJGPP version of Emacs is supported only on systems which support long file names (e.g. Windows 9X or Windows XP). You need to unpack Emacs distribution in a way that doesn't truncate the original long filenames to the DOS 8.3 namespace; the easiest way to do this is to use djtar program which comes with DJGPP, since it will behave consistently with the rest of DJGPP tools. Do _not_ disable the DJGPP long-file-name support (a.k.a. "LFN") while building Emacs. (By the time you read this, you have already unpacked the Emacs distribution, but if the explanations above imply that you should have done it differently, it's safer to delete the directory tree created by the unpacking program and unpack Emacs again, than to risk running into strange problems during the build process.) To unpack Emacs with djtar, type this command: djtar -x emacs.tgz (This assumes that the Emacs distribution is called `emacs.tgz' on your system.) When unpacking Emacs is done, a directory called `emacs-XX.YY' will be created, where XX.YY is the Emacs version. If you want to print international characters, install the intlfonts distribution. For this, create a directory called `fonts' under the `emacs-XX.YY' top-level directory created by unpacking emacs.tgz, chdir into the directory `emacs-XX.YY/fonts', and type this: djtar -x intlfonts.tgz To build and install Emacs, chdir to the `emacs-XX.YY' directory and type these commands: config msdos make install Running "config msdos" checks for several programs that are required to configure and build Emacs; if one of those programs is not found, CONFIG.BAT stops and prints an error message. On Windows NT and Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7, running "config msdos" might print an error message like "VDM has been already loaded". This is because those systems have a program called `redir.exe' which is incompatible with a program by the same name supplied with DJGPP, which is used by config.bat. To resolve this, move the DJGPP's `bin' subdirectory to the front of your PATH environment variable. Windows Vista/7 has several bugs in its DPMI server related to memory allocation: it fails DPMI resize memory block function, and it arbitrarily limits the default amount of DPMI memory to 32MB. To work around these bugs, first configure Emacs to use the `malloc' function from the DJGPP library. To this end, run CONFIG.BAT with the "--with-system-malloc" option: config --with-system-malloc msdos make install In addition, for Windows Vista you'll need to install Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later and enlarge its DPMI memory limit by setting the value of this Registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Wow\DpmiLimit Create this key if it does not exist. The value is a DWORD; setting it to 536870912 should let Emacs use up to 512MB of memory. If you have other problems, either building Emacs or running the produced binary, look in the file etc/PROBLEMS for some known problems related to the DJGPP port (search for "MS-DOS"). To install the international fonts, chdir to the intlfonts-X.Y directory created when you unpacked the intlfonts distribution (X.Y is the version number of the fonts' distribution), and type the following command: make bdf INSTALLDIR=.. After Make finishes, you may remove the directory intlfonts-X.Y; the fonts are installed into the fonts/bdf subdirectory of the top-level Emacs directory, and that is where Emacs will look for them by default. Building Emacs creates executable files in the src and lib-src directories. Installing the DJGPP port of Emacs moves these executables to a sibling directory called bin. For example, if you build in directory C:/emacs, installing moves the executables from C:/emacs/src and C:/emacs/lib-src to the directory C:/emacs/bin, so you can then delete the subdirectories C:/emacs/src and C:/emacs/lib-src if you wish. The only subdirectories you need to keep are bin, lisp, etc and info. (If you installed intlfonts, keep the fonts directory and all its subdirectories as well.) The bin subdirectory should be added to your PATH. The msdos subdirectory includes a PIF and an icon file for Emacs which you might find useful if you run Emacs under MS Windows. Emacs on MSDOS finds the lisp, etc and info directories by looking in ../lisp, ../etc and ../info, starting from the directory where the Emacs executable was run from. You can override this by setting the environment variables EMACSDATA (for the location of `etc' directory), EMACSLOADPATH (for the location of `lisp' directory) and INFOPATH (for the location of the `info' directory). Emacs features which require asynchronous subprocesses that depend on multitasking do not work in the DJGPP port. Synchronous subprocesses do work, so features such as compilation, grep, and Ispell run synchronously, unlike on other platforms. This file is part of GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs. If not, see .