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Building Emacs
I was building Emacs on a virtual machine today and realized that I’ve been building Emacs on various machines for nigh on twenty years. The first machine I built Emacs for was an IBM RT running AIX 2.1. That was a tough build—no one had done it before that I could find. This was before the standardized configure scripts that figured everything out for you. I learned a lot.
Things have gotten considerably easier. I find that building Emacs is easier than trying to find the right thing pre-built and isn’t that hard. Here’s what you do.
- Use the following line to grab the latest source:
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sv.gnu.org:/sources/emacs \\ co emacsNote that this is the latest snapshot. If you’re not adventurous, find a stable release. On the other hand, I’ve never had any trouble. This is a code base that’s on version 22, after all. - This will create a directory called emacs in the current directory. Go into it: cd emacs
- Configure the package: ./configure. If you’re building on OS X, use ./configure —enable-carbon-app
- Do a bootstrap make: make bootstrap
- Do a make from the bootstrap: make
- Install it: sudo make install
The bootstrap takes a long time to build, the second make is quick. The installation takes some time. When it’s done, you’ve got the latest emacs on your machine.
Posted by windley on April 25, 2007 10:49 AM
Comment from David Rowe at April 28, 2007 2:58 PM
I recently worked out how to build emacs for a WRT54G. This was a fun project - I had to dig into the bootstrap process. For example, what happens to the bootstrap process when the machine you build on is different from the target? I have managed to get temcs running so far.
Why would anyone want to run emacs on a WRT54G router? Well there is a lot of great emacs software for the blind - and the WRT makes a nice low cost wireless PC platform. All you need to add is some form of audio output and a keyboard and you have a low cost PC for the blind (no display needed).
Comment from David at June 4, 2007 7:41 PM
When you say bootstrap takes a long time, could you mean...48 hours on a 1.7 G machine !!? I'm installing a new disto (Arch)and getting emacs in is proving difficult: when make bootstrap reaches the point where it starts compiling .el to .elc, the cpu seems to put itself almost to sleep, spending 0-1% of time in userspace, and 99-100% of time idling. This is probably not an emacs issue at all, but I'm stumped. Google brought me here; can you offer a crumb of insight?
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