Re: Seting up a non-root installation

On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 4:51 PM, Anthony Frachioni <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello GoboLinux!
>
> I've just found GoboLinux, and it appears to offer a useful way in which to
> manage software in user space.  I am trying to build various things, and
> have a couple questions:
>
> -- First, my primary goal is to manage an assortment of free software
> installed on a machine running Ubuntu (and possibly others) to which I do
> not have root access.  GoboLinux seems well suited to this task, am I wrong
> in this assessment?

I used Gobo Rootless in this manner.  This was over five years ago, I
think, so my information may be out of date.

> -- Simply running InstallPackage without downloading the package beforehand
> fails for all packages I've tried, presumably because the official GoboLinux
> page is the only package mirror not down.  Is there a way to fix this?

InstallPackage installs binary packages that are compiled to be used
inside Gobo Linux (ie, not inside Rootless).

Inside Rootless, you want to use Compile and compile packages from source code.

> -- Any time I InstallPackage, I get the following message (even on apparent
> success).  Maybe this isn't a problem, but it seems to suggest somebody is
> trying to use root paths in a non-root installation.  Does it indicate a
> problem with my installation?
> /sbin/ldconfig.real: Can't create temporary cache file /etc/ld.so.cache~:
> Permission denied
>
> -- GCC installs, but the resulting executable is broken.  It cannot find
> libgmp.so.3, which isn't there and is not created by installation of the GMP
> package.  If I cheat a bit and soft-link libgmp.so.3 to libgmp.so.10 (this
> is probably a very bad idea anyway), I get the message:
> /usr/include/features.h:374:25: fatal error: sys/cdefs.h: No such file or
> directory
> This sounds bad.  As I am unable to get a working C compiler in Gobo-space,
> the Compile script does not work (though it does appear to succeed at
> finding recipes).  Is there any way to set the compiler used by Compile to
> something else?

Good luck with that.  I expect GCC has many dependencies, and may
require extra work to get it working inside Gobo Rootless.

I would often run "apt-get build-dep <debian-package-name>" to install
all the Debian/Ubuntu provided dependencies and the run "Compile
<gobo-recipe-name>" to try to compile the package inside Rootless.

I have not used Gobo Rootless in years.  Most recently, when I wanted
to use a new version of GCC, after trying several options (including
manually compiling the compiler - I was unsuccessful), I ended up just
setting up a VMs inside VirtualBox running Debian testing and/or
Debian unstable and working inside the VMs.

Good luck!

-mpb