Emacs on Andrew's Memory Blog

Building Emacs 29.4 on Ubuntu 22.04

andrewmemoryblog@gmail.com (Andrew's Memory Blog) — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 20:10:15 -0700

I recently had to rebuild Emacs to diagnose a problem. It turned out the problem wasn’t the Ubuntu Emacs build, but since I had to figure it out, I’m writing it down so I will remember next time.

Grab the GNU public keys
#

GNU has to be different. Rather than signing with some sane thing, they sign their files with gpg. 🙄 Anyway, here’s how to do that:

$ curl https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg --output gnu-keyring.gpg$ gpg --import gnu-keyring.gpg
# Yes, it just imported 552 keys.

Download Emacs and validate the signature
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Feel free to substitute your favorite mirror for ftp.gnu.org

$ curl https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-29.4.tar.gz.sig --output emacs-29.4.tar.gz.sig
$ curl https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-29.4.tar.gz --output emacs-29.4.tar.gz
$ gpg --verify emacs-29.4.tar.gz.sig
emacs-29.4.tar.gz
gpg: Signature made Sat 22 Jun 2024 08:04:31 AM MST
gpg: using RSA key BB02E407AE9EAA87C9E72A1D2D4E1FE95957135D
gpg: issuer "stefankangas@gmail.com"gpg: Good signature from "Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se>" [expired]
gpg: aka "Stefan Kangas <skangas@skangas.se>" [expired]
gpg: Note: This key has expired!
Primary key fingerprint: CEA1 DE21 AB10 8493 CC9C 6574 2E82 323B 8F43 53EE
Subkey fingerprint: BB02 E407 AE9E AA87 C9E7 2A1D 2D4E 1FE9 5957 135D

I guess? that means it’s trustworthy?

Install dependencies
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In order to build you’ll need some dependencies, so install those using apt.

$ sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev libgif-dev libgnutls28-dev texinfo

Extract, build and install Emacs
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Next, extract the files. Then configure Emacs for your environment, build it and finally install it.

$ tar xzvf emacs-29.4.tar.gz
$ cd emacs-29.4/
$ ./configure (or use ./configure --with-x-toolkit=no if you don't want X support)
$ make clean; make
$ sudo make install (this installs emacs in /usr/local/bin)
$ /usr/local/bin/emacs
(if you want to uninstall)
$ sudo make uninstall

This build installed Emacs in /usr/local/bin, which is ahead of /usr/bin in my path, so I can have both the version I built and the package version installed at the same time. Either change your path, alias emacs=/usr/local/bin/emacs, or uninstall the Ubuntu emacs package.

Clean up
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Once you’re done, you can remove libgtk-3-dev, libgif-dev, libgnutls28-dev and texinfo. Or keep ’em around, they won’t hurt anything.

Locking weirdness between Ubuntu, CIFS and Emacs

andrewmemoryblog@gmail.com (Andrew's Memory Blog) — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 01:37:20 -0700

I’d run into a strange problem that made working with Emacs really painful. Any time I edited a file with Emacs on my CIFS mounted drive on Ubuntu 22.04, I’d see:

Unlocking file: Invalid argument

… when I opened it. Then, when I tried to save, I’d get a message that the save failed. I couldn’t exit Emacs, even when I said to abandon changes. (The changes themselves got saved successfully.) I could kill with a SIGTERM, but that left the file locked so I couldn’t edit it again.

I tried rebuilding Emacs from source. Same issue. I suspect there’s a problem with CIFS file locking everywhere on Ubuntu, not just Emacs. Some day I’ll turf the Ubuntu built-in CIFS and go back to Samba. In the meantime, sometimes all you have is a rock when you want to pound in a nail. Adding:

;; Something weird going on with file locking on CIFS. Disable it.
(setq create-lockfiles nil)

to my ~/.emacs solved the problem.

Inserting current date and time with EMACS

andrewmemoryblog@gmail.com (Andrew's Memory Blog) — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:16:06 -0700

I was recently involved in an activity that required keeping track of notes with timestamps. I decided to do it in EMACS. Here’s what I stuffed in my .emacs init file:

;; Insert the current time in the current buffer
(defun
timestamp()
(interactive)
; If you want to insert date and time, you can use:
(insert(format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S ")))
;; Bind Ctrl-T ("transpose") to the timestamp function - need a better key binding
(global-set-key (kbd "C-t") 'timestamp)

Incidentally, I also needed to save the file to DOS format instead of Unix format. To do that:

M-x set-buffer-file-coding-system

then use “dos” (or “mac” or “unix”).

Emacs on Andrew's Memory Blog

Building Emacs 29.4 on Ubuntu 22.04

Grab the GNU public keys #

Download Emacs and validate the signature #

Install dependencies #

Extract, build and install Emacs #