Blender with system python failing I'm working on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.  I downloaded Blender 2.76b and deleted the python directory to push blender to use the system distribution of python.

Ubuntu comes with both python 2 and 3, but the python command is linked to 2.7 on my system.

When I try to start the blender application, I get the following message:

connect failed: No such file or directory
Read new prefs: /home/alex/.config/blender/2.76/config/userpref.blend
Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: Unable to get the locale encoding
ImportError: No module named 'encodings'
Aborted (core dumped)


How can I troubleshoot this issue?  I'm thinking it's a pythonpath problem but I'm not sure what path the blender app is looking for when it starts, python or python3.  Thanks for the help!

EDIT

I tried deleting the python dir and then running the following:

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/python3.4 


in the same directory, giving me a symlink to python3.4.  Unfortunately, I still get the same error on running blender.

Alex
All right... I had the same error appearing today and I have been able to solve it. It's been pretty easy. After removing blender and installing blender from ppa:thomas-schiex/blender There were some files still around.
To make sure everything works try:

sudo apt-get purge blender
cd /usr/lib
sudo rm -r blender
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install blender


Since everything is purged AND manually removed from versions installed manually it should be fine now. Have fun  :)