Re: Installing emacs binaries in non-standard location

[koolpkr@gmail.com]

On Friday, September 10, 2010 11:39:45 AM UTC-5, Derek wrote:
> Hopefully this will help someone else.I was given access to a bunch of AIX(6) boxes at work that didn't have emacs and didn't have a compiler so I couldn't build emacs fromsource. I was able to find some binary RPM's for AIX athttp://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/aix/linux/toolbox/rpmgroups.html I used* emacs-21.3-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm * emacs-el-21.3-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm* emacs-leim-21.3-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm * emacs-nox-21.3-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpmOf course I couldn't install the rpms because I am a non-root user, so I extracted the files from the rpms using rpm2cpio like sorpm2cpio myrpmfile.rpm | cpio -idmvI actually extracted them on a linux box because I didn't have rpm2cpio on the AIX box.Once they were extracted, I tarred everything up and moved it to a directory on the AIX box that I had permissions to. I then tried to run "emacs-nox."It wouldn't run because these were binary packages and the standard locations of the files were "built" into the binaries. It was looking for the standard files at/opt/freeware/share/emacs/21.3/.......I was getting the following errorsWarning: arch-dependent data dir (/opt/freeware/lib/emacs/21.3/powerpc- ibm-aix5.1.0.0/) does not exis\t. Warning: Lisp directory `/opt/freeware/share/emacs/21.3/site-lisp' does not exist. Warning: Lisp directory `/opt/freeware/share/emacs/site-lisp' does not exist. Warning: Lisp directory `/opt/freeware/share/emacs/21.3/leim' does not exist. Warning: Lisp directory `/opt/freeware/share/emacs/21.3/lisp' does not exist.but of course I didn't have permission to install it there as a non- root user. I had installed it in/home/myuser/emacs/opt/freeware/.... After some searching, I found that I could set some environment variables to override the default locations of the files. Here are the variables I set.EMACSLOADPATH=/home/myuser/emacs/opt/freeware/share/emacs/21.3/lisp EMACS_DIR=/home/myuser/emacs/opt/freeware/share/emacs/21.3 EMACSDATA=/home/myuser/emacs/opt/freeware/share/emacs/21.3/etcand exported themexport EMACSLOADPATH EMACS_DIR EMACSDATAI could then successfully start emacs-nox on the AIX boxes. AhhhhhhHope this helps someone else avoid a slow painful death by vi.


Hi Derek, this is really cool post, it has helped me immensly for setting up emacs on my AIX development environment. Thank you so much for sharing this information. I would just like to add I extacted .rpm files using 7-zip on windows platform, but result is same which is "Running emacs successfully".