Bad news: my college unix box doesn't have many of the software that I use often (eg. mpg123, gs2pdf, gaim....etc)

Good news: I have my mandrake installation cd which contains tons of rpms

Bad news: can't install them

I type : rpm -i mpg123-0.59r-20mdk.i586.rpm

they type: failed to open /var/opt/freeware/lib/rpm/packages.rpm: The file access permissions do not allow the specified action.

error: cannot open /var/opt/freeware/lib/rpm/packages.rpm

It seems that I can't access packages.rpm?

Good news: I copied packages.rpm into my home folder and immediately the owner of the file changed from root to me.

Is there someway I can tell the rpm application use the packages.rpm that I copied into my home folder instead of the one in the default /var folder?

Or can I simply install a whole new rpm application with all dependencies in ~/bin and have everything I need in my home folder.



Either way, my ultimate solution would be to install software on my college's unix box. So if you have any solution to my problem at all, any method, please do tell. Thanks very much.

If you're talking about CollegeLINUX, then it's Slackware-based, so RPMs will be problematic. If you have rpm2tgz installed, you can try converting the RPMs to *.tgz files. But even then, it's somewhat of a crapshoot.

Have you been to the CollegeLinux website?

And if you really do mean your college's unix system, I don't think you've got a prayer of getting the RPMs to work, but be sure to let us know if you do.

Enjoy!
--- Cerbere

If you can't install RPMs, you can extract them and place the files by hand. It is done like this:

rpm2cpio foo-1.0-1.i386.rpm | cpio -di

You can ofcourse try to build the software from the sources yourself. Besides, many free programs are distributed only as source code on the Internet. Be sure to read the readme and install files included with the sources. If you don't have much permissions outside your home directory, you may have to use make install DESTDIR=/some/directory (instead of just make install) or place the ready files by hand.

Note that programs compiled on Linux and PC don't necessarily work on other operating systems and architectures. Even the Linux distribution and versions of libraries matter.

Regards
Simon

I'm trying to install software on a unix system on my college network (not collegelinux).
Their unix absolutely sucks and does not have any nice software that I used to use on my linux os.
On top of all that, I don't have any permission to install software the easy way, which is just rpm -i software.rpm because that requires writing to folders soch as /bin and stuff.

So I'm trying very hard to install software into my own home folder.

But I keep failing! for example when I tried to install wget,
-bash-2.05b$ CC='gcc' ./configure --prefix=/myhomefolder/destination
configuring for GNU Wget 1.9
checking build system type... powerpc-ibm-aix5.1.0.0
checking host system type... powerpc-ibm-aix5.1.0.0
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking for a BSD-compatible install... ./install-sh -c
checking for gcc... gcc
checking for C compiler default output... configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.

why won't the C compiler create executables???

I donno what to do. Perhaps I am not compiling right. But I have no clue about using make...etc, I've always just used rpm -i. Anyone have any suggestions? Please help.

And Wipe, I tried cpio, but there's a segmentation fault, and then I tried to use make install destdir, and it says make: 1254-002 Cannot find a rule to create target install from dependencies.
Stop.

Now did you actually see the log?

It may be that the administrators have prohibited the use of the compiler. If the rules of your college deny any program installations, it's probably no use asking them for instructions... Although begging and/or giving good educational reasons might work.

As for cpio giving a segfault, it can be for a number of reasons. And make should be run after configure (if there is one) has finished succesfully.

Anyway, this seems to be an AIX related problem, not Linux. There is a separate forum for AIX on this site.

I did some quick googling ("aix binaries") and found this site, which seems to offer some precompiled stuff for AIX:
http://www.bullfreeware.com/

Not all programs have been ported to AIX running on a PowerPC. The source code has to support the particular system.

Regards
Simon

Simon, that website rocks. I found the softwares that I want to install under the 5.1 version of AIX.
Everything went smoothly until the last moment of installation using smit.

error reports that sm_inst is denied permission to execute. So I went to the folder and found that only root can execute it:
-r-x------ 1 root system 76926 Mar 28 2003 sm_inst*

that truly sucks, and if my campus's unix sys admin is reading this...I hope you get electrified by your keyboard.