Re: Installing emacs binaries in non-standard location

[fimbaz@gmail.com]

I am in your exact situation. This post was the last piece of the puzzle.  You rock!
On Friday, September 10, 2010 9:39:45 AM UTC-7, 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 from
> source.
> 
> I was able to find some binary RPM's for AIX at
> 
> http://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.rpm
> 
> Of 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 so
> 
> rpm2cpio myrpmfile.rpm | cpio -idmv
> 
> I 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 errors
> 
> Warning: 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/etc
> 
> and exported them
> 
> export EMACSLOADPATH EMACS_DIR EMACSDATA
> 
> I could then successfully start emacs-nox on the AIX boxes.  Ahhhhhh
> 
> Hope this helps someone else avoid a slow painful death by vi.