Installing to your home drive [LWN.net]

Installing to your home drive

Posted Feb 22, 2011 13:46 UTC (Tue) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224)
In reply to: Optimizing Linux with cheap flash drives by Tara_Li
Parent article: Optimizing Linux with cheap flash drives

(and why can't I, as a user, install a package to *my* home directory, instead of having to go to root and install it system wide? I know, I wander off topic...)

$ ./configure --prefix=/my/home/dir 
$ make
$ make install

Beyond this, you need to dig into the Makefile (or whatever the build utility is) to figure out how it's installed. Very often there is a install_prefix variable of some kind.

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Installing to your home drive

Posted Feb 23, 2011 5:45 UTC (Wed) by idupree (subscriber, #71169) [Link]

Most package managers offer binary (already-compiled) packages. Most Linux/Unix software can't have its prefix changed *after* compilation. Everyone's user directory has a different path (thus, prefix). Thus, problems.

Options I've heard of & played with: GoboLinux's "Rootless" project is a system for installing from source in your home directory (on any distro). ZeroInstall I believe does source and binary (not sure how it manages binary) without root privileges. Some NixOS research has looked into rewriting the paths in compiled packages (though not changing its total-number-of-characters length).

Installing to your home drive

Posted Feb 23, 2011 9:34 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Also, gnulib contains support code to make 'relocatable packages' work (by looking at argv[0], or, if this contains no path, by hunting along $PATH to find itself, then using relative paths everywhere in the knowledge of the location of the binary). GCC has worked this way for ever, but it's only fairly recently that relocatable support has started to find its way into other GNU programs. (Most non-GNU programs still don't care, but the GNU Project cares about keeping its stuff installable into people's home directories on random systems: that's how it started, after all.)

Installing to your home drive

Posted Feb 23, 2011 19:08 UTC (Wed) by talex (subscriber, #19139) [Link]

ZeroInstall I believe does source and binary (not sure how it manages binary) without root privileges.

In my experience (0install developer), a surprising number of programs are relocatable:

Anything that's been ported to Windows or Mac will be relocatable.
Anything that encourages non-technical end-users to download beta versions will be relocatable.
Things written in languages with built-in string concatenation (i.e. anything except C) are usually relocatable.
Libraries always seem to be relocatable (not sure why this is; maybe to allow them to be bundled with other relocatable programs?).

There were a few suggestions for supporting non-relocatable programs (e.g. using Plash to adjust paths at runtime, Klik-style binary rewriting, etc) but there don't seem to be many programs that need it these days.

Installing to your home drive

Posted Feb 23, 2011 22:36 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Libraries always seem to be relocatable (not sure why this is; maybe to allow them to be bundled with other relocatable programs?).

That is definitely not always true. The KDE3 libraries, for instance, were not relocatable: they had $datadir and $libdir/kde3 baked into them. (I think the same is true of glib and gtk as well.)