environment variables for running emacs

environment variables for running emacs

[Kin Cho]

Hi,

I'm trying to run emacs on a machine without first installing
emacs on that machine.  The reason being the machine has a small
and very slow flash memory disk, and there are many of these
machines that I'd like to run emacs on them.

Other than having a small and slow disk, these machines run
normal Gnu/Linux with networking.

So on machine foo I mounted bar:/ as /bar.  Machine bar
has a normal emacs installation.  On machine foo I setenv as
follows (from (info " (emacs) General Variables")):

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/bar/usr/lib:/bar/usr/X11R6/lib
EMACSDATA=/bar/usr/share/emacs/21.2/etc/
EMACSLOADPATH=/bar/usr/share/emacs/21.2/site-lisp:/bar/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp

Now on foo I run /bar/usr/local/bin/emacs and it gives the
following error:

Warning: arch-dependent data dir (/usr/local/libexec/emacs/21.3/i686-pc-linux-gnu/) does not exist.
Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/21.3/site-lisp' does not exist.
Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp' does not exist.
Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/21.3/leim' does not exist.
Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/21.3/lisp' does not exist.
Cannot open load file: term/x-win

So it appears that on a Gnu/Linux system, setting the variables
EMACSDATA EMACSLOADPATH aren't sufficient to run emacs.

If this is not a bug but a unsupported feature, please consider
this post a feature request to a variable such as EMACSROOT
whereby emacs can be started without a prior installation.

-kin