GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installing GNU/Linux Basic Survival Wajig Applications AI, Machine Learning, Data Science Android - GNU/Linux Devices Audio Backup Booting CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Cloud Computing Command Line Databases DIA Directories Disks Emacs EcoSysL Email Evolution Files File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks FreedomBox Fonts Ghemical Glade GNOME Graphics, Images, Photos Hardware Initialisations on Booting Installation Examples IOT Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan MATE Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Power Management PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Screens Security Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce Spreadsheet SSH SUDO Swap Teradata Data Warehouse Themes TV Unity USB Version Control Video Virtualization Voice over IP World Wide Web WebCam WordPress Web Sites Word Processing and Printing X XML Troubleshooting Index

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE UPDATED SURVIVAL GUIDE

Emacs Using 100% CPU

This seems to be a problem with emacs recently (late 2006 and into 2007). I eventually tracked down a solution that seems to fix emacs-snapshot on Debian, from http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-501837-highlight-emacs+cpu.html. I followed the instructions but it started happening again, probably because the source code for the fix (as detailed below) is in a couple of places.

A quick fix is to set the Emacs variable semantic-idle-scheduler-idle-time to a large number (by default it is 2 seconds) so that the idle scheduler does not kick in (which is what is using all the CPU)!

The actual solution below edits the file semantic-idle.el and ensures all binary copies of it are replaced (including, for me, emacs-snapshot/site-lisp/semantic/semantic-idle.elc, which did not seem to have a source version).

So, first edit the file /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/semantic/semantic-idle.el to comment out line 290:

          ;;GJW(semantic-idle-scheduler-kill-timer)

Similarly, comment out line 294, but be sure to retain the final three closing braces:

      ;;GJW(semantic-idle-scheduler-setup-timer)
)))

Next, start up, as root, a new emacs and byte compile the package:

$ sudo emacs -nw -q
  M-x byte-compile-file <ret> 
  /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/semantic/semantic-idle.el
  C-x C-c

As mentioned above, copy the byte copmiled version across to emacs-snapshot/site-lisp/semantic/semantic-idle.elc.

Now start up Emacs and hopefully it won't consume all the CPU again!

Edward Garson reports (28 Apr 2007) that the same fix works for XP and Fedora 6.