portage in redhat userspace

bcward · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Jan 2007 Posts: 89

All of the linux systems on my school's campus run redhat enterprise, complete with software about 5 generations old. More and more I am building applications on my own and I am building a rather extensive collection of libraries and programs in ~/usr/ and ~/bin/. Recently I went to install ruby 1.9 and the autoconf installed is too old. After thinking a little bit I realized that package managers are designed to aleviate the stress of building all of these dependencies, such as newer versions of autoconf. Since I don't have root access I can't install things with yum (or better yet scrap yum entirely for portage or apt), so is there a way to install portage in my user directory? Then have a ~/etc/make.conf and have everything I build put in ~/usr/ and ~/bin/ ? Or do I need to continue doing all of this by hand?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Mar 11, 2009 9:28 pm Post subject:

bcward,

If you have the space and access to the chroot command, you could do a Gentoo install in the directory of your choice.
You would not be able to boot into it but once your chroot, you would have Gentoo running on top of Red Hat services.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

bcward · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Jan 2007 Posts: 89

I don't have access to chroot, so that won't work.

I guess even if I were to be able to install portage in user space, portage wouldn't necessarily know what software was installed on the redhat system so it would have to rebuild a whole bunch of dependencies even if I just wanted to upgrade a handful of applications. I guess I will just stick with doing things by hand. Thanks for your input though.

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

If you wanted to get very tricky, you could install gentoo inside a virtual disk stored in your home directory. Since you don't have access to chroot, you would likely have to create the image elsewhere and transfer it over to your school /home directory. I also assume you don't have access to your grub.conf, so to boot it, you would need to manually enter the proper grub entries at each boot.

You should make sure something like this is OK and doesn't violate your school's internet policy. Also you would probably need at least 10 gigs available for your virtual disk to make things useful.