RHEL-6 Cut Copy Paste between emacs and other windows applications crashes emacs

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • Cut, copy and paste actions between emacs and other windows applications crash emacs.
  • Seems to be limited to gtk applications such as firefox, thunderbird, chrome, gedit and firefox 5.
  • When pasting nothing shows up, there is an error thrown in the emacs Backtrace buffer and emacs crashes.
  • The Backtrace buffer, if able to be captured, contains the following:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument symbolp "compound-text")
  coding-system-base("compound-text")
  xselect-convert-to-string(PRIMARY UTF8_STRING "buffer")
  read-event()
  byte-code(...

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

  • Firefox 3.6.18

  • Firefox 5 downloaded and installed exhibits same behavior.
  • Emacs as supplied in RHEL 23.1-21.el6
  • Gnome Desktop Environment
  • Home directory containing profiles that have been in use for previous installations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Subscriber exclusive content

A Red Hat subscription provides unlimited access to our knowledgebase of over 48,000 articles and solutions.

Current Customers and Partners

Log in for full access

Log In
Close

Welcome! Check out the Getting Started with Red Hat page for quick tours and guides for common tasks.