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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T12:04:37+00:00

I want to install multiple versions of a package (say libX) from src. The

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I want to install multiple versions of a package (say libX) from src. The package (libX) uses Autotools to build, so follows the ./configure , make, make install convention. The one installed by default goes to /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib and I want to install another version of this in /home/user/libX .

The other problem is that libX is a dependency for another package (say libY) which also uses autotools. How to I make libY point to the version installed in /home/user/libX ? There could be also a possibility that its a system package like ffmpeg and I want to use the latest svn version for my src code and hence build it from src. What do i do in that case ? What is the best practice in this case so that I do not break the system libraries?

I’m using Ubuntu 10.04 and Opensuse 10.3.

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  1. Editorial Team

    You can usually pass the --prefix option to configure to tell it to install the library in a different place. So for a personal version, you can usually run it as:

    ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr/libX

    and it will install in $HOME/usr/libX/bin, $HOME/usr/libX/lib, $HOME/usr/libX/etc and so on.

    If you are building libY from source, the configure script usually uses the pkg-config tool to find out where a package is stored. libX should have included a .pc file in the directory $HOME/usr/libX/lib/pkgconfig which tells configure where to look for headers and library files. You will need to tell the pkg-config tool to look in your directory first.

    This is done by setting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH to include your directory first.
    When configuring libY, try

    PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/usr/libX/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure

    man pkg-config should give details.

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