A weblog of how I set up my new Dell in 217 CN

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Mon, 03 Nov 2003

Mon Nov 3 20:31:11 2003 Cut-and-Paste: The Search Continues
When we last tuned in, our intrepid investigator had fired up an Emacs 21.2 under FreeX86 on his home computer, and discovered that cut-and-paste seemed to work fine.

Then Colin managed to build Emacs 21.3 on denali. I tried running that on Dell217, and reported that cut and paste did not seem to work.

So now, just for kicks, I tried running the denali emacs from my home machine. Guess what: cut/paste worked fine!

So it sounds like there must be something different about the X server setup on the two machines. How strange is that?

Any ideas on what I could look at to detect the difference?

Emacs versions:

"GNU Emacs 21.2.1 (i686-pc-cygwin, X toolkit)
 of 2003-01-23 on DRACO"

"GNU Emacs 21.3.1 (sparc-sun-solaris2.9, X toolkit)
 of 2003-11-03 on denali"

X server startup on my home machine:

C:\cygwin\usr\X11R6\bin\XWin.exe -multiwindow -clipboard

Mon Nov 3 11:51:14 2003 Progress on emacs cut-and-paste problem
Late last night I ran across http://pdx.freedesktop.org/Standards/clipboards-spec/clipboards.txt, which has a nice explanation of various interpretations of the ICCCM. I didn't grok the whole thing, but I ran across the following text:

The current consensus is that interpretation b) is correct. Qt 3 and
GNU Emacs 21 will use interpretation b), changing the behavior of
previous versions.

So on my home Dell, I did the following: From cygwin, I opened up an xterm (using the workaround from the preceding article), and said "emacs &". Up popped a copy of emacs 21.2, which I had sucked up from someplace or other.

And lo and behold, cut-and-paste _seemed_ to work fine. I didn't get a chance to use it intensively, but I ran through the same sequence of operations that Colin and I tried, and it worked like a charm.

So it sounds like upgrading to an emacs from the current century now offers something to make it worth the effort.

posted at: 12:00 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Mon Nov 3 11:47:44 2003 Running xterm
I found a work-around for the fact that SHELL comes up as

SHELL=C:\PROGRA~1\RATIONAL\RATION~1\NUTCROOT\mksnt\sh.exe

I simply say: xterm -e tcsh .

On the machine in 217, this has the bonus behavior of reading my regular .tcshrc, so I have most of the functionality I'm used to. I'll have to ftp my .tcshrc down to my machine at home.

posted at: 11:55 | path: | permanent link to this entry