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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-08T10:21:00+00:00

I need to run a program on a linux machine, and the only one

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I need to run a program on a linux machine, and the only one I have access to is my university’s server with (for some reason) outdated versions of autoconf and automake. My program needs more recent versions. I have the most recent versions of each on the server in my home directory, but can’t install them in /usr/local/bin since I’m not a root user. So I guess I have two questions:

  1. How to get autoconf/automake to install somewhere in my home directory? Is this possible?
  2. How to get a program to access these newer versions, instead of automatically calling the outdated ones?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    My preferred method for this is to use GNU Stow to manage packages in my home directory. You can use $HOME or $HOME/usr or whatever else. I think $HOME/usr is probably best, as it stops stow from having to walk all over your homedir.

    So first you configure and install stow. Download and unpack it, then run something like:

    $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr && make && make install prefix=$HOME/usr/stow/stow-2.2.0

    Then you make stow stow itself:

    $ cd ~/usr/stow
$ stow-2.2.0/bin/stow stow-2.2.0

    Now you add $HOME/usr/bin to $PATH. Then you install autoconf. Unpack and cd into it, then run:

    $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr && make && make install prefix=$HOME/usr/stow/autoconf-2.69
$ cd ~/usr/stow
$ stow autoconf-2.69

    Why do I do this? it lets me easily remove a package from my home directory without causing massive headaches: cd ~/usr/stow && stow -D autoconf-2.69, for instance. I manage /usr/local in a similar fashion, but there I can get stow from apt, so there’s no bootstrapping trouble.

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