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Node:Info crashes,
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Q: Whenever I invoke info.exe
, it immediately crashes! How
can I use DJGPP without reading all those wonderful docs??
A: One possible reason for this is a bug in EMM386
shipped
with some versions of DOS 6.x. This bug is only triggered if your
system loads the DISPLAY.SYS
driver, usually to display non-US
characters supported by your national codepage. In addition, this bug
causes Info to crash only if it is run in 35- or 40-line display mode;
any other display size avoids the problem. (The default display mode is
40 lines, as set in the [info]
section of DJGPP.ENV
.) So
either switching to another display size, or removing either
EMM386
or DISPLAY.SYS
from CONFIG.SYS
, should
prevent Info from crashing.
If you use DJGPP v2.0, yet another cause of crashes in Info
might
be trailing whitespace in the DJGPP.ENV
file. The tell-tale signs
of this failure are a stack dump that is bogus or doesn't start with
your `main' function, or a series of SIGSEGV that won't stop. Actually,
this is a bug in the DJGPP v2.0 startup code, so any v2.0 program could
crash in this way, but since the last section of stock v2.0
DJGPP.ENV
belongs to Info
, it is the one which suffers
most from this bug. Make sure your DJGPP.ENV
doesn't have a
^Z character at the end (some DOS editors put it if you edit the
file), and doesn't end with a blank line. Alternatively, upgrade to
DJGPP v2.01 or later, where that bug is fixed.