Linux – Installing software on Linux without root privileges

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I find it extremely hard to install software on a Linux machine as a regular user. I don't have root privileges on this machine, so I can't use any package manager system.

For example I'm trying to install a simple IRC client, but installing everything from source is a pain because I have to manually download and install every single dependency on the tree (irssi->glib->ncurses etc.. etc..).

So I downloaded ircii which seems to be the most minimalistic client I can find, it still requires some program called lex which I can't find.

Any easy solutions for this hassling task? Why don't people just deliver binaries that have all I need included in them (sort of like .exes)?

Best Answer

You might want to take a look at the Nix package manager. Not only is its whole approach to package management very interesting, but the website also claims that it works on every Linux distribution and allows non-privileged users to install software using it. You can find more information as well as a complete list of all available packages (ca. 2500) at http://nixos.org/nix/ .

Related Solutions

Linux – Installing software on Linux without root privileges

You can install software into your own home directory. If you're comfortable compiling from source, and the package uses automake, then you can use the following option on configure:

--prefix=$HOME/install

or whatever. Similarly, rpm has a prefix option as well. However, this only works if the rpm was built to be relocatable.

Linux – Building a disk image without root privileges

I can offer two (non-ideal) options:

Create a 'placeholder' file inside your disk image and splice the kernel into the image (ick)
If you don't need to use FFS, you could try FAT. mtools is very handy for this sort of thing.

Example:

michael:~> mdir -i test.img ::
 Volume in drive : is Testing (abbr=TESTING    )
 Volume Serial Number is 0000-0000
Directory for ::/

No files
                          1 457 664 bytes free

michael:~> mcopy -i test.img kernel.com ::
michael:~> mdir -i test.img ::
 Volume in drive : is Testing (abbr=TESTING    )
 Volume Serial Number is 0000-0000
Directory for ::/

kernel   com     47632 2009-06-17  16:50 
        1 file               47 632 bytes
                          1 409 536 bytes free

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – Installing software on Linux without root privileges

Linux – Building a disk image without root privileges

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