I had the need to set up irssi on my University shell account with minimal user access, so I took some notes on what I did. I have found out that a lot of people encounter the missing glib dependency, which is absolutely necessary for irssi to execute properly. Due to the problem's popularity, I included installing glib in this guide.

Prepare Shell to Include Custom pkgconfig/library Directories

We need to prepare our (bash) shell to include our custom directories in the search path for executables and libraries.

1. $ echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.user_inst/bin' >> ~/.bash_profile
2. $ echo 'export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/.user_inst/lib/pkgconfig' >> ~/.bash_profile
3. $ echo 'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/.user_inst/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile
4. $ source ~/.bash_profile

Download Program Archives

The following may change a bit, depending on your specific setup. The test shell that I used for this guide, as well as many other shell providers, only have a few necessary apps installed. irssi requires the glib2 library to be installed... which usually is not included with a shell! For this reason, I included it in the guide.

You might be able to check what version of glib you have:

Note that glib2 version 2.6.0 or above is needed to satisfy the irssi dependencies.

1. $ dpkg -l | grep glib2

1. $ rpm -q glib2

1. $ pkg_info | grep glib2

I like to create a single directory to store the filesystem for all of my manually installed packages and hide it so I don't have to see it. In the guide, I use $HOME/.user_inst as the base directory, but note that you may use any path you would like.

First, create a temporary work directory we can store and compile files in. Then we just download and extract the file that we need.

If wget does not work for you, try using fetch in its place.

1. $ mkdir ~/tmp_files
2. $ wget ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub21/glib-2.21.6.tar.gz
3. $ tar xvzf glib-2.21.6.tar.gz
4. $ wget http://irssi.org/files/irssi-0.8.14.tar.bz2
5. $ tar xjvf irssi-0.8.14.tar.bz2

Also, I had to do a fresh install of zlib because I was on a 64 bit Linux box. If you are in the same boat, download the following file as well.

1. $ wget http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
2. $ tar xvzf zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

Compile and Install Programs

Now, all that is left is to install the new programs! If something that we compile happens to fail due to unsatisfied dependencies, mimic the above instructions, but include what ever program is in question.

If you happened to need the zlib step from above, do the following first.

1. $ cd ~/tmp_files/zlib-1.2.3
2. $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/.user_inst
3. $ make && make install

1. $ cd ~/tmp_files/glib-2.21.6
2. $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/.user_inst
3. $ make
4. $ make install
5. $ cd ~/tmp_files/irssi-0.8.14
6. $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/.user_inst
7. $ make
8. $ make install

If everything went ok, we should be all set! Try launching irssi in the terminal!