Emacs cannot load startup files

Question

I upgraded emacs on the remote terminal to 23 snapshots. Since I did not have root privileges, I did "make install" with the prefix set to a folder in my home directory. Now, when I start emacs, it gives an error message "I can not open the load file: encoded-kb", it also can not start dired or load cc-mode. I tried running it with '-no-site-file', '-Q', '-q', they all have the same problem. My .emacs are empty. Any suggestions?

Thank you for your help.

Regards, Nishith

Update: these are the messages I get when I try to run "emacs" with no arguments.

Warning: arch-dependent data dir (/usr/local/libexec/emacs/23.0.93/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/) does not exist. Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/23.0.93/site-lisp' does not exist. Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp' does not exist. Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/23.0.93/lisp' does not exist. Warning: Lisp directory `/usr/local/share/emacs/23.0.93/leim' does not exist. 

Its a 64-bit system. Emacs source code was taken from cvs using

 cvs -d:pserver: [e-mail] :/sources/emacs co emacs 

Update2: Thank you Charlie and Trey for your answers. I think I will skip "make install" and stick to using src / emacs. Greetings.

Answer 1

AFAIK, make install required if you want to install the package in a system-wide one. The prefix defines only the prefix path of this system-wide installation, but still requires the correct directory hierarchy (bin /, / lib, / share, etc.). If you just want to use CVS Emacs, you can run it right after the make procedure. For example, the source code for Emacs is in ~/src/emacs/ , and I can just type ~/src/emacs/src/emacs to start Emacs.

Answer 2

For me, this error disappeared when, instead of changing the prefix variable in the Make files, I did:

 ./configure --prefix=/my_special_path/usr/local 

Answer 3

"encoded-kb.el" is in the standard internationalization code in the EMACS lisp directories, so something doesn't get the correct path. Your download path is somewhere somewhere. There are hooks in the makefile so you can explicitly specify the boot path to fix this.

Try resetting the boot path after starting, say, using (pp load-path) and see what it really looks at. To rate this, enter

 (pp load-path)^j 

in the buffer *scratch* . This buffer must be in lisp -interaction mode. ^j (Control-j, aka Cj) says to evaluate it. and pp will pretty print the list.

Answer 4

In my case, my MacOSX just pointed to an old version of Emacs, I don’t know why. Therefore, when I open it on the GUI, everything was fine, but when I tried to open it on the terminal, I got this error. So, I first discovered where the shortcut was pointing and fixing the path /usr/bin/emacs as follows:

 $ emacs --version GNU Emacs 22.1.1 Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. GNU Emacs comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. You may redistribute copies of Emacs under the terms of the GNU General Public License. For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING. $ whereis emacs /usr/bin/emacs $ sudo rm /usr/bin/emacs $ sudo ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/emacs/HEAD/bin/emacs /usr/bin/emacs $ emacs --version GNU Emacs 24.4.50.1 Copyright (C) 2014 Free Software Foundation, Inc. GNU Emacs comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. You may redistribute copies of Emacs under the terms of the GNU General Public License. For more information about these matters, see the file named COPYING. 

Answer 5

I ran into the same issue by building emacs 23.1 on AIX. In my case, I wanted to install emacs in my directory, since I was the only developer using emacs. The problem can be resolved by changing the paths in the src / epaths.in file before running configure. Configure uses this file to create epaths.h. The --prefix = option does not change the paths in the epaths.in file. Using -prefix = and modifying the epaths.in file fixed my problems.

Answer 6

I ran into the same problem by building emacs 25.0.92 on Windows 7.

 D:\emacs\bin>emacs Warning: arch-dependent data dir 'd:/emacs/libexec/emacs/24.5/x86_64-w64-mingw32/': Invalid argument Warning: arch-independent data dir 'd:/emacs/share/emacs/24.5/etc/': Invalid argument Warning: Lisp directory 'd:/emacs/share/emacs/24.5/site-lisp': Invalid argument Warning: Lisp directory 'D:/emacs/share/emacs/24.5/lisp': Invalid argument 

And I found the problem. There is a registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GNU\Emacs , which determines the boot path of EMACSLOADPATH .

I will simply delete the registry key to solve the problem.