Re: [tbox-l] non-privileged user installs?

[David C. <cl...@au...>]

Phil,

  This isn't going to be perfect for you, but I think it will at least
get you what you want, which is making the commands from coreutils
available without having to build them yourself.
The packages are not relocatable, and many of them have dependencies on
libraries where it will look explicitly in /opt/freeware/lib and stuff like
that, but in the case of coreutils I think most (if not all) of them are just
general standalone commands that can probably run elsewhere.  I did a little
experimenting, and here is what I came up with.  I'll include the failures
because I think they are instructive.  I'm pretending you want to install
them in /home/prl2/toolbox, but you could use another path name.  And I
have the coreutils rpm image in the current directory as I run this.  Also
I did it all on the command line w/o using the .rpmrc config file:

$ mkdir /home/prl2/toolbox
$ rpm --root /home/prl2/toolbox -Uv coreutils*rpm
failed to open /home/prl2/toolbox/var/opt/freeware/lib/rpm/packages.rpm: No such file or directory
 error: cannot open /home/prl2/toolbox/var/opt/freeware/lib/rpm/packages.rpm

OK, that's easy to correct; make the local database directory and initialize
it, then try again:

$ mkdir -p /home/prl2/toolbox/var/opt/freeware/lib/rpm
$ rpm --root /home/prl2/toolbox --initdb
$ rpm --root /home/prl2/toolbox -Uv coreutils*
error: failed dependencies:
        /sbin/install-info   is needed by coreutils-5.0-1
        /bin/sh   is needed by coreutils-5.0-1
        /bin/sh is needed by coreutils-5.0-1
        libc.a(shr.o) is needed by coreutils-5.0-1
        libiconv.a(shr4.o) is needed by coreutils-5.0-1
        libintl.a(libintl.so.1) is needed by coreutils-5.0-1

All of these dependencies are installed with rpm and are simply not known to
your local non-root database.  Instead of making a virtual package, let's just
install with --nodeps to ignore dependency-checking,
$ rpm --root /home/prl2/toolbox -Uv coreutils*rpm --nodeps
coreutils-5.0-1
unpacking of archive failed on file /opt/freeware/bin/basename: cpio: open failed - Permission denied

OK -- now that let me attempt to install, but it didn't work because it can't
write to /opt.  Let's try using --relocate:

$ rpm --root /home/prl2/toolbox -Uv coreutils*rpm --nodeps --relocate /opt=/home/prl2/toolbox
path /opt is not relocateable for package coreutils-5.0-1

The package is not relocatable.  But there is an option "--badreloc" which
says to relocate files even though the package doesn't allow it.  Try that:

$ rpm --root /home/prl2/toolbox -Uv coreutils*rpm --nodeps --badreloc /opt=/home/prl2/toolbox
coreutils-5.0-1
unpacking of archive failed on file /usr/bin/dir: cpio: symlink failed - Permission denied 

That error is only because it is trying to create symlinks into /usr/bin for
the commands that don't otherwise exist on AIX.  But notice that it took a
longer to run, and you'll see why.  Go into your /home/prl2/toolbox directory
and you'll see a "freeware/bin" subdirectory that has all the commands you want.
So although it didn't officially install, you've now got your commands.


I think the real answer is that you can't really install this non-root and
should ask the administrator if they'll install it properly, but you can
more-or-less work cheat around it by doing the above.  With coreutils, I bet
most of the commands will work.  The other option would be to build your
own coreutils from source and run "configure --prefix=/home/prl2" from the
top of the coreutils source tree.


On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 12:46:37PM -0400, Phil Lawrence wrote:
> On Oct 20, 2004, at 10:26, Phil Lawrence wrote:
> > I've searched the archive of this list, but didn't find anyone
> > talking about how to install aixtoolbox RPMS as a non-privileged 
> user...

-- 
David Clissold
cl...@au...