Re: Updating to Emacs 24

[S Boucher <stbya@yahoo.com>]

----- Original Message -----

> I downloaded the Pretest version of Emacs 24, having Emacs 23.1.1
> installed on Ubuntu. Before I mess up my whole configuration, I thought
> I rather ask a few (quite basic) questions here:
> 
> 1. do I have to uninstall Emacs 23.1.1 before installing Emacs 24?

No.

mkdir /some/dir/for/emacs24
cd /some/dir/for/emacs24
mkdir soft
tar xzf emacs-24.tgz
cd emacs
./configure --prefix=`cd ../soft&&pwd`
make all
make install

Note: In the process of configuring you might have to install additional package using synaptic to be able to compile emacs.

Then run with /some/dir/for/emacs24/soft/bin/emacs

or do

export PATH=/some/dir/for/emacs24/soft/bin:$PATH
and run emacs

Caveats:
- you may or may not have problems with private .elc files
- maybe some config/data files might get upgrade to 24, and they might then not work if you go back to 23

I don't know how real those caveats are.

> 2. I load most .el files from my .emacs.de, which is in my Dropbox-folder
> and therefore accesible from my Linux and my Win 7 machine, and not from the
> /usr/share/emacs directories - will this configuration be messed up by
> the new installation?

See my caveats.  I can't answer with confidence on private config/data files.

> 3. should I change from Ubuntu 32 to 64, are there no problems with the
> 64bit version?

That seems unrelated to emacs.  But linux distros work quite well on 64bits... provided you have a 64bit processor :-)