Emacs installation problem

[gaspardb]

I've successfully got Gentoo installed and working for the most part. I did an 'emerge emacs' and then when I bring it up the text in the buffer has been replaced by little squares. Are there other packages I need??

[nixnut]

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Portage & Programming.
postinstallation problem
_________________
Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

talk is cheap. supply exceeds demand

[limn]

I have seen this problem twice in the past six months with an emacs that had been fine. I do not know what causes it, nor point to one thing that fixed it.
Google had heard of it, but did not have a cause or obvious fix. I am surprised you have it on a fresh install.

In the first case:
re-emerged emacs, Xaw3d (which then required a revdep-rebuild), xorg-x11 with bitmap font support, freefonts, sharefonts, and emacs with lesstiff support.

Emacs was still having the rectangles. Two days later, after a reboot and an emerge -u world, emacs was back to normal.

In the second case:
re-emerged emacs, fontconfig, (several other font related packages), and xorg-x11 without font-server support.

And emacs was back to normal.

I have not seen this problem with xemacs.

[teknomage1]

Could you post the results of 'emerge -pv emacs' ? It could be that emacs defaulted to displaying unicode on a non-unicode session, or that it's drawing font info from somewhere wrong.

[whitebear]

I have the same problem with emacs on a fresh install of gentoo. I used the emacs, gnome and the kernel from the Live CD. I have tried emerging emacs, but it did not help. Emerging the Gnome meta package with the emacs use flag set. However the compilation of xorg-x11 failed so I do not know what the result of that would be yet.

My results of
emerge -pv emacs

[teknomage1]

Have you tried emerging freetype?

[allucid]

Emacs relies on your X server configuration for finding fonts. Make sure the "Files" section of your xorg.conf is correct. Here's mine for reference:

[whitebear]

I notice three lines that allucid's xorg.conf has that mine does not. I am not sure which might be critical. I tried adding the RgbPath and ModulePath lines to mine but this resulted in X failing to load and complaining that the modules do not exist. (no surprise). I also notice that there are a couple of fonts paths I do not have, Type1 and ms. What packages do I need to emerge get these fonts.

I also tried emerging freetype as technomage1 suggested. This did not help.

here are my font paths

[allucid]

The modules line is, I believe, for xorg 7 (modular xorg). RGB path is pretty standard, but if you were missing something emacs would complain about colors. Not sure what Type1 is from. My 'ms' dir has fonts copied over from windows, nothing important.

[whitebear]

I have sucessfully updated xorg with the Emacs use flag. I have installed freefonts and sharefonts. The bitmap-fonts use flag which was mentioned is set by default. I have remerged Emacs
I have restarted X. The problem persists. I happened to run Emacs from the command line and got the following warning.

[whitebear]

Solved!
The font paths for the bitmap fonts are needed in the files section of xorg.conf

[gustafson]

In addition to the fixed mentioned, there is something else that can cause this problem... I'm sure there are many ways to screw it up. The base emacs font can be user specified in the ~/.Xdefaults file. For example, this is the current line on my machine.

emacs*font: -adobe-courier-bold-*-*-*-24-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

One must log out and log back in for this to take effect. I had it specified incorrectly and couldn't figure out what to do. After trying many solutions including several long emerges, I realized the error of my ways, fixed the line, and logged out and back in. Mixed great joy (it is working) and great sadness (for the lost hours).