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#1 2011-05-12 20:10:47
- rogersce
- Member
- From: California
- Registered: 2011-04-17
- Posts: 7
using a package manager w/o root access
I do a lot of scientific programming at work on different servers with out of date CentOS repositories and without root access. To get the libraries I need and to keep them up to date, what I'm doing now is compiling every program I need from source on every computer I use, and never updating the software.
Is it possible to a package manager to operate in $HOME without root priviledges? For intsance, could I install yum (CentOS package manager) into $HOME or, even better, install pacman into $HOME and pull and update software from Arch repos into my $HOME directory? Or has anyone run into this problem and figured out a better way to install and update software?
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#2 2011-05-12 20:43:26
- demian
- Member
- From: Frankfurt, Germany
- Registered: 2009-05-06
- Posts: 709
Re: using a package manager w/o root access
pacman has a --root <path> option. Try that (I haven't).
Also, I don't know how you or the admins would feel about this but if you've got physical acces to the machines, anything is possible.
Specifically, you could use a Linux LiveCD to mount the root partitions of said servers and reset the root passwords (in /etc/shadow).
A less drastic approach would be to add your user(s) to /etc/sudoers with an entry like this
Username ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/pacman
no place like /home
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#3 2011-05-12 21:16:11
- tavianator
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- From: Waterloo, ON, Canada
- Registered: 2007-08-21
- Posts: 859
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Re: using a package manager w/o root access
There was this a while ago, not sure if it still works: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=96898
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#4 2011-05-12 22:55:45
- rogersce
- Member
- From: California
- Registered: 2011-04-17
- Posts: 7
Re: using a package manager w/o root access
demian: Thanks for the suggestions. Finding a strategy for coping with not having sudo priviledges is preferable, since we have an IT guy with root access who doesn't (and probalby shouldnt) give this out to us normal users.
tavianator: Thanks, this looks like what I had in mind. Hasn't been updated in a while but I'll give it a try.
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#5 2011-05-13 18:51:20
- fsckd
- Forum Fellow
- Registered: 2009-06-15
- Posts: 4,173
Re: using a package manager w/o root access
If you can consider not using Arch, there is Rootless GoboLinux.
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