Install application more than once.
 

Is it possible to install the same application more than once in linux. For example could I run open office 5.1 and 6.0 on the same machine? In windows this information is stored in the registry, is there some comparable file / place where this info is kept?

I have an application that the owner would like to install twice on a server and I honestly just don't know if you can.

...and I also don't know how to uninstall either.

We can't use rpm or yum because it's a shared server and the vendor gave us instructions which were something like....compile the code, run ./configure which somehow sets it up.

Packages can be distributed in multiple formats. rpm is used by RPM for single packages and yum for yum repositories.

One can also distribute source code which is what it sounds like you have here. Typical procedure is:
Download the source package (usually ends with a .tgz or .tar.gz)

Use mkdir to make a directory in which to extract the files.

Run "tar tvf" against the downloaded file to see what it is going to extract.

Run "tar xvf" against the downloaded file to do the actual extract if you're comfortable with what the "tar tvf" displayed.

Run "./configure" in the directory in which the files were extracted. This discovers what is available on your system (mostly libraries and commands) that can be used by (or are required by) the package. Some things will give warnings meaning that you can proceed without them whereas other things might fail completely. (e.g. some applications can do ssl but don't require it - if they find ssl libraries they'll configure it in but if not they'll exclude it - if you WANT ssl capability in the application and it isn't already installed you'd need to install ssl then do the configure again).

After the configure is successful you run "make" which compiles the source into binaries based on the configuration options it set during the configure phase.

Many apps have "make install" that can be done after the "make" that will move binaries, libraries, scripts etc... into the standard locations expected by the application.

You could omit the "make install" if this particular package has it and/or review its documentation to see if it has a way to tell it to install in an alternate directory. You could just manually copy the binaries into alternate paths but need to be sure they don't have hard references to the default paths.

Some apps use certain resources (such as memory addresses) and can't run multiple copies unless you explicitly tell them what resources to use other than the default.

To sum it up: It depends on the app itself. Many apps can run multiple copies from multiple locations. Some can run multiple copies from a single location and some can not run more than one copy at all. You'll have to review the documentation for the app.

Many apps include README and/or README* files in the downloaded bundle that you can read to get more details. README is typically overall whereas the README* files could be for various purposes (e.g. README.configure might talk about what options to explicitly use on the command line when you run configure, README.runtime might give details about how to make a runtime only copy etc...)

In that case, ask the vendor (seriously); they would know if it can be done and how.
It may not be possible.

I ran 2 versions off FF by renaming the /bin/ff & also the executable in the ff folder the only problrm I had was updating. Actually I was running iceweasel & ff
I renamed the real ff to /bin/firefox2 like I said it wouldn't get updates. But you can run 2 versions of applications by renaming thebin file & manually installi making links