Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!udel!burdvax!bpa!cbmvax!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.unix.microport Subject: Re: Emacs on Microport Message-ID: Date: 9 Apr 88 02:24:02 GMT References: <933@umbc3.UMD.EDU> <329@uport.UUCP> Distribution: na Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 40 >Does anyone have any recommendations on Emacs for Microport UNIX? >Specifically, has anyone gotten GNU Emacs up on one? Jove can be configured to be fairly compatible with Gnu. Of course it doesn't have the fancier features, but for editing I don't notice any differences. It has similar built in help, command and file name completion, etc. So for people who really want Gnu, I'd recommend looking into Jove. However people considering running Emacs might want to know about the following problems I've seen: - JOVE likes to put the time at the lower right of the screen. If you use that, you'll drop input characters because of bugs in handling of signals. I have a workaround for this, which was posted in my JOVE diffs. - JOVE occasionally suffers from problems with malloc. Typically these trigger unnecessary swapping. Apparently one of these problems has been fixed in a kernel PTF, and the other is fixed by using my version of malloc. - Recently I've started seeing hangs where ps shows the process in "X" state (expanding memory), with a WCHAN below 0x200. It looks like the memory manager has gotten confused about what it should be waiting for, and will wait forever. The process can't be killed except by a reboot. I have also seen this happen when starting vi. This problem only appeared after I put up the new asynch driver and the clock priority changed posted to the Uport BBS. I've just removed the latter. I agree with the Uport consultant that I talked to about this that neither of those kernel updates could possibly be causing this problem, but those are the only thing that has changed in my kernel, so it's worth trying... - It is very slow to start, apparently because my disk is fairly slow and so loading it takes a lot of time. I tried doing "chmod +t", hoping that by keeping it in swap space, startup would be speeded. I'm not entirely clear about this, but so far it doesn't look like this feature has any effect.