[PLUG] Royal Road to learning emacs

[Victor Soich]

Dear Rogan,

I am a linux god.  And you deified me.

After your last email, I almost sent the email way at the bottom of
this email  to the PLUG and you.  I was so sick and tired of trying to
compile emacs from source.  I decided to leave the "compiling from
source emacs" problem alone for awhile.  Then I read you last email
that you sent me yet again, combined it with what I read in the text
file:

~/src/emacs-22.1/etc/PROBLEMS

I wound up doing :

apt-get install libncurses5-dev

Then I did

./configure -prefix=/opt

and

make

and furthermore

make install

and finally

 /opt/bin/emacs

and glory of glories, my emacs editor came up!  I have been having so
much angst over this for the longest of times.  I've been veritably
obsessed by it.

The following are my motivations and problems viz a viz linux.

If I'm going to use some crazy free non-mainstream operating system, I
might as well use the craziest, most free version of all.  I settled
on Debian.

Since I'm using such a hard operating system, I might as well learn to
use the command line, because "Real Men Do It From The Command Line".

Since I'm engaging in self-flagellation, I might as well add the
hardest version of text editors to the mix, i.e emacs.

I feel the version of emacs that you get when you do apt-get install
emacs, is inadequate  ( I actually want to use more colorful language
of what I think of Debian and emacs at this juncture! ) I decided, and
was influenced, to get a more modern version of emacs.

Because I wanted a modern version of emacs, I decided I would do it
with source code.

When I finally figured out how to compile from source, I succeeded
with compiling emacs from source, and when I went to invoke emacs,
i.e.

/opt/bin/emacs

I got the stupid frustrating, enraging,

emacs: Cannot open termcap database file

At this point, I gave up trying to get emacs to work.  When Rogan
Creswick said do:

apt-get install libncurses5-dev

and then told me to reconfigure, et. al.

emacs finally worked!

I did not realize that the whole configuration process does not update
your PATH.  I think some of my Windows programs do that.

I did not realize that I had to use a fully qualified path name to
invoke the program if my PATH wasn't updated.

I did not realize what commands in the configuration process could be
done as a regular user, and what had to be done as root.

I wasn't sure how to become root.

A lot of unnerving, fingernails scratching on the cardboard, major
little obstacles waylaid me on my "Royal Road to learning emacs"

Now...I guess I have to learn to use the darn editor.  Uh...Oh...

So, let me wax eloquently viz a viz Rogan Creswick and getting emacs
to work.  I couldn't have done it without him, and more generally, I
couldn't have done it without PLUG!  May my testimonial bear good
fruit.

Sincerely,
Victor Soich





The following is an email that I almost sent to PLUG and Rogan
Creswick.  I'm glad I didn't because I finally got emacs to work from
the command line.


Dear PLUG,

I am endeavoring to compile emacs from source.  I believe I have
successfully did the configure, make, make install stuff.  The
following is what is on my system:



[vsoich at c-24-22-47-214 /opt/bin]$ ls
b2m  ctags  ebrowse  emacs  emacs-22.1  emacsclient  etags
grep-changelog  rcs-checkin
[vsoich at c-24-22-47-214 /opt/bin]$ ./emacs
emacs: Cannot open termcap database file
[vsoich at c-24-22-47-214 /opt/bin]$ ./emacs-22.1
emacs: Cannot open termcap database file
[vsoich at c-24-22-47-214 /opt/bin]$


The system cannot open termcap database file.


In the text file:

~/src/emacs-22.1/etc/PROBLEMS

It says:


** Emacs does not start, complaining that it cannot open termcap database file.

If your system uses Terminfo rather than termcap (most modern
systems do), this could happen if the proper version of
ncurses is not visible to the Emacs configure script (i.e. it
cannot be found along the usual path the linker looks for
libraries). It can happen because your version of ncurses is
obsolete, or is available only in form of binaries.

The solution is to install an up-to-date version of ncurses in
the developer's form (header files, static libraries and
symbolic links); in some GNU/Linux distributions (e.g. Debian)
it constitutes a separate package.



I don't know what it means to install an up-to date version of ncurses
in the developer's form ( header files, static libaries and symbolic
links)

I can do apt-caches search, and apt-get install, but I don't know what
to search for or install specifically.  Once I do install the
appropriate stuff, do I need to do configure, make, make install, on
my emacs source code again?

Sincerely,
Victor Soich