Short story: Problem: Mandrake puts a .Xdefaults file in each user account home directory. The entries for emacs don't work. There is no problem with the RedHat emacs rpms. Reason?: On RedHat the emacs executable is 'emacs', and it picks up the Xdefaults intended for it. On Mandrake, 'emacs' is a script which tries to determine the most appropriate emacs binary to run. This will either be 'emacs-20.3' or 'emacs-nox', and the Xdefaults for emacs will not be picked up. Work arounds: 1) Change .Xdefault entries to 'Emacs' with a capitial E. These defaults will then be applied to xemacs too, which may be undesirable. It does fix some other problems encountered when trying to use the KDE Krdb settings though ... 2) Change the name of the emacs-20.3 binary to emacs-20_3, and change the emacs entry in .Xdefaults to 'emacs-20_3'. 3) Take the defaults out of .Xdefaults, and put them in .emacs. This will stop Krdb applying KDE styles to emacs though. I quite like the default (RedHat) emacs colours, though I've changed the menubar to be more KDE-like: Emacs*menubar*Font: -adobe-helvetica-medium-r-normal--12-120-75-75-p-67-iso8859-1 Emacs*menubar*background: #ece1d5 Emacs*menubar*foreground: #000000 The RedHat colours don't look so good with the Mandrake font-lock-mode colours specified in the .emacs file. Or maybe that should be the other way round?? Steven
