Sai Charan

Installing mosh, the MObileSHell on a linux box with no sudo access can be quite a bit of a pain. And, with many users working with shared, managed linux gateways, I suppose this could be useful to a larger audience.

In this note, I will attempt to install mosh into the home directory of user sai with home directory at /home/sai assuming user sai does not have root access on this machine. This note further assumes that a basic development environment is already set up and available.

Installation notes:

• First create the local directory to install into: mkdir -p ~/usr
• As listed in the building from source section, Protocol Buffers and IO::Pty Perl module. To do this, download Protocol Buffers, untar and run: ./configure –prefix=/home/sai/usr && make && make check && make install from the source root directory.
• Download mosh, untar and run export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/sai/usr/lib/pkgconfig && ./configure –prefix=/home/sai/usr && make && make install from the mosh source root directory.
• Note that IO::Pty is not needed at compile/install time. Instead, it is needed to run mosh, which is a perl script. The steps are a little more involved, but I am going to gloss over the details here. Feel free to seek clarifications in the comments section below.
  • Run cpan (I chose ‘no’ for manual configuration).
  • Inside cpan, run install IO::Tty; if the files fail to download, download the files manually, transfer to ~/.cpan/sources/authors/<appropriate-path>.
  • These following two commands allow local install paths from within cpan command. Source: PerlMonks. cpan> o conf mbuildpl_arg “–install_base /home/sai/usr/local/” cpan> o conf makepl_arg “PREFIX=/home/sai/usr/local/”
  • Again, run install IO::Tty
• Add these lines to your .bashrc or appropriate startup shell configuration file: export PERL5LIB=$PERL5LIB:/home/sai/usr/local/lib64/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/x86_64-linux-thread-multi: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/home/sai/usr/lib: export PATH=$PATH:/home/sai/bin:

Thats it. You should now be able to run mosh. To test, you can run: mosh localhost.

Note. I used cpan since cpanm was not available on the system.

---

Tags  ·   mosh  ·   perl local install  ·   Show Comments ▾