After upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10, my emacs got a bug. Whenever I wanted to enable the flyspell-mode, minibuffer answer was “Enabling Flyspell mode gave an error”, no more information were given even with the debugger turned on.
Some googling, web surfing, et cetera… and still nothing.
Finally, right now (after almost 3 week, and quasi-given up), it occurs to me that and update of Emacs could solve the problem… How?
THAT’S IT!!!!! I looked for an Emacs PPA source,
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-elisp/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
And problem solved.
I had the same problem and this is the solution.
Thanks a lot!
thankyou! how did they get away with shipping ubuntu 10.10 with a busted emacs? whats the point in linux with a busted emacs? oh well – it works now; so lets get on!!
Thank you for the solution.
WOW! you saved me so much time! THanks!
Didn’t help me. But when I tried to ispell a single word, emacs complained that it couldn’t find /var/lib/ispell/american.hash. Sure enough, installed iamerican, problem went away.
Hi Patricia, well the problem was the flyspell mode enabling. If you just want to spell check, the only thing you should be aware of is that your language dictionary is installed, for example for US English is the iamerican one, for British English is ibritish, Spanish has ispanish… and so on!
For those who wonder how to install them, in Debian-based platforms is like,
Thank you for your comment!
P.D.: Now that you have all packages installed and the updated version of Emacs, try the flyspell-mode,
in your Emacs session. 😉
That’s quite a bad bug. I find this a considerable regression to have to copy/paste command lines and URLs just to get a basic functionality working. If an updated version of Emacs is REALLY needed, why isn’t it included in main repository instead of relying on a PPA? Waiting six months just to get that fixed, at the next Ubuntu release, is TOO LONG. I just gave up on Mandrake/Mandriva because of such practices and now Ubuntu is going the same wrong way. But Ubuntu was the only way for me to get something other than an half-configured Linux installation requiring three weeks of work to get all my devices working again, at each update. Again, I’m stuck with no way out. This makes me believe that Linux is a dead end and there is some other OS I am not aware of.
Hi Eric.
Yeap, you’re right in many aspects.
I’m not sure these personal opinions help you… but still got to say something 😛
Enjoy!
I just found a way without upgrading Emacs from a PPA.
In /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/dictionnaries-common, I removed flyspell.el, ispell.el, and debian-ispell.el.
In /usr/share/emacs23/site-lisp/dictionnaries-common, I removed the same files, plus the .elc files.
With this, I got Flyspell working a first time a few months ago, got the problem back this morning, and fixed it again after I found the fix a second time. Before forgetting, I wanted to log a trace of this.
Here is where I found the workaround: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dictionaries-common/+bug/619015.
Still the easiest way to go. Thank you very much, that was saving a lot of time.
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