Stephen, You mentioned you would be interested in small Install How-To's, So I am offering one based on my recent install. I'm sure there are errors and misspellings, feel free to correct or ask me to correct. Same to anyone else. User-Contributed Installation How-To: xemacs-21.5.32 on Slackware64 14.0 11/8/2012 user: Steven Mitchell These are the 17 steps taken to install xemacs-21.5.32.tar.gz for all users, on a slackware64 14.0 installation: 1. Download xemacs-21.5.32.tar.gz Download the md5sum and make sure you have a good download. verify: md5sum xemacs-21-5-32.tar.gz md5sum returns a long number. compare the md5sum you get to the md5sum file available from the place you downloaded the file. If they are the same, we have a good downloaded copy. 2. as root, copy the file xemacs-21.5.32.tar.gz from where ever you downloaded it, to /usr/src with a command like this: cp /home/steve/Downloads/xemacs-21.5.32.tar.gz /usr/src/ verify: ls /usr/src and look to see if the file you copied is there. If your distribution of linux doesn't have a /usr/src directory, create it with this command before copying the above file to it: mkdir -p /usr/src 3. cd to /usr/src/ and unpack the the file in /usr/src/ with this command: gzip -dc xemacs-21.5.32.tar.gz | tar xf - verify: ls -l to check that the file did get unpacked. It should have created a directory: /usr/src/xemacs-21.5.32 with some subdirectories and files. 4. Read the INSTALL file in the /usr/src/xemacs-21.5.32 directory to determine if you will want to download and install any of the external libaries that XEmacs can use. These need to be downloaded and installed sometime before you run ./configure which checks that these external libraries are installed. verify: To tell if you have each of the libraries in the list installed, run the command ldconfig to see a list of all libaries installed: /sbin/ldconfig -p To search to see if a certain library is installed, run this command: /sbin/ldconfig -p |grep <full/partial library name, eg. xpm> Once you have all of the external libraries you think you might want to have installed, continue to the next step. 5. cd xemacs-21.5.32 verify: pwd the pwd command prints the working directory, the directory you are currently "in". Check to see that is it correct. 6. Choosing command line options for ./configure. There are many command line options you can set. Almost everyone will have at least some options to specify and almost nobody will be able to install XEmacs without specifying some options. To get a list of the valid options for configuring xemacs, in the /usr/src/xemacs-21-5-32 directory, as root, run the command: ./configure -help=short It is longer than one page, so you might want to run it piped to less: ./configure -help=short | less Note which options you want for your installation. and keep a list of the options you need to put on the command line. It is particularly important to set the paths options to have it install correctly. Here is an example of the ./configure options for my system: Run ./configure in the /usr/src/xemacs-21-5-32 with these options set: --prefix=/usr/local (prefix for installation) --with-widgets=yes (use this if you want buffer tabs) (if compiled in, can still be turned on/off) --with-jpeg (to process .jpg's in w3, email, etc) --with-xpm (use the .xpm graphics file format) --with-png (use the .png graphics file format) --with-mule=no (no=w/o international character support) (with-mule = with international character support) So my command line for ./configure looks like this (all on one line): bash-4.1# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-widgets=yes --with-jpeg --with-xpm --with-png --with-mule=no Note paths do not have to be quoted. If multiple locations are specified for any of the paths, the syntax is a list with each element in quotes: ( "/path1" "/path2" "/path3") Assemble a command line with ./configure and all options you choose for your installation and run it. verify: if ./configure ends with no errors, go to the next step. 7. While still in the directory /usr/src/xemacs-21-5-32, run the command: make verify: When make ends, fix any errors till it "makes" without errors, then continue. At this point it is possible to try-out the program without installing the executable and other files to where they go once installed. To do so, run this command from within the /usr/src directory: ./src/xemacs 8. To finish the install, putting all the files where they go in your Linux system, run the command: make install (must be root, and still in the directory /usr/src/xemacs-21-5-32) verify: to be sure you are root, run the command: whoami Which will print your user name. To be sure you are in the right directory, run pwd Which will print the current dirctory. If there are no errors when "make install" is finished, then continue. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------- That is the end of installing the main xemacs program ------------- ------------ To make it fully usable, we need some packages ------------------ ----- Next step is bootstrapping the packaging system, Which consists of------ -------- downloading & manually installing 2 packages, then using the -------- --------- package manager to download the rest of the xemacs packages--------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9. To bootstrap the packaging system, download 2 files: efs-1.34-pkg.tar.gz xemacs-base-2.27-pkg.tar.gz One place to get them is the xemacs ftp site: http://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/packages/ verify: run md5sum <archive name> to generate the md5sum for your downloaded files. Compare these to the md5sums in README.MD5 file in the ftp directory they were downloaded from. 10. Create an xemacs package directory, as root: mkdir /PREFIX/share/xemacs/xemacs-packages PREFIX is the prefix option you specified on the ./configure command above. Using the --prefix in my example above, this now expands to this command: mkdir /usr/local/share/xemacs/xemacs-packages Execute this command, substituting what *you* specified for PREFIX. We will refer to this PREFIX in the following commands as well. verify: use ls -l /PREFIX/share/xemacs/ to see that the directory is there. Note: These directions are for XEmacs 21.5 or later, the install path was slightly different for XEmacs before 21.5: before 21.5: install path was /PREFIX/lib/xemacs/ 21.5 and after: install path was /PREFIX/share/xemacs/ 11. As root, copy these two files from where you downloaded them to the /usr/src directory: cp <your-download-path>/efs-1.34-pkg.tar.gz /usr/src cp <your-download-path>/xemacs-base-2.27-pkg.tar.gz /usr/src verify: ls -l in /usr/src to check if the files are copied right. Note: it is not strictly necessary to put these files in /usr/src/--they could be unpacked and installed from most any directory, but for the sake of giving clear directions with the least amount of confusion, I am treating this as a step in the directions. 12. Change to the newly created directory for packages: cd /PREFIX/share/xemacs/xemacs-packages verify: execute pwd to see that you are in the right directory. 13. In the new xemacs-packages directory, as root, unpack the two files we just copied tar -xzvvf /usr/src/efs-1.34-pkg.tar.gz tar -xzvvf /usr/src/xemacs-base-2.27-pkg.tar.gz verify: ls -l should show that there are now directories named etc, info, lisp, man, and pkginfo 14. start xemacs by typing xemacs in a root terminal: xemacs verify: If you had a version of xemacs installed before, xemacs might find and try to load your old .init.el, and if any packages were specified in your previous .xemacs, you may get errors. OK to ignore them for the moment and continue setting up the package manager. If the errors are severe and prevent xemacs from starting up, try starting xemacs with this command: xemacs -vanilla which loads XEmacs without configuration files. 15. First of three steps in setting up the package manager is to specify a site to download packages from: on the menu, choose [tools][packages][set download site][official releases] then choose a download site from the list given. The menu allows there to be 2 download sites to be specified (numbered 1 and 2 in the menu). Both can be set now, but it is only necessary to set 1 of them (the first one) at this time. The [pre-releases] and [site releases] menu items do not need set at this time. 16. Second of three steps is to download a list of available packages. on the menu, choose [tools][packages][update package list] this will go online and find the current xemacs packages list. One error that may come up at this step is the minibuffer may display: Symbol's value as variable is void: allow-remote-paths The most likely problem to cause this error is xemacs is not finding the 2 packages (efs and xemacs-base) that we downloaded and installed in previous steps. Check carefully the ./configure options that you selected before compiling the xemacs source code. particularly the options having to do with paths. You may have to go back to the /usr/src/ directory and assemble a new ./configure command line, and start the install process over from that point, since the paths for your installation are set by running ./configure and are compiled into your xemacs executable. 17. Third step of three steps is to choose and install the rest of the packages that you want to use. On the menu, choose [tools][packages][List And Install] this will start the package manager and present you with a list of packages that are available. For directions, go to the bottom of the page to see a list of keystrokes to mark, unmark, uninstall, and install packages. Choose packages with the plus key and then x to install the all the selected packages. verify: when the package installing is done, exit xemacs and start it again and repeat step 17 to see which packages it now shows as installed. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://lists.xemacs.org/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta