Install program to home folder, not /

Question

I want to install flightgear I understand I can install it by doing sudo apt-get install flightgear, etc.

However, computer uses a SSD and a HDD, with my SSD being very limited. With flightgear being such a large game, it takes up several gig's of my SSD, which is not going to work.

My home folder is on my HDD, so I want to install it directly to /home/$USER/flightgear/

How can I do this?

I would appreciate other ways too (eg. aptitude, synaptic, dpkg)

Edit: If you do (for example) sudo apt-get download chocolate-doom and then open the .deb with Archive manager, you can extract the files and then use them. This works... but seems like a big hack for something that should be simple to do...

Answer 1

I found that Flightgear was quite small (1.5Gb), it is just the aircraft and scenery that make it 50Gb in size....

So if you install it using apt-get, you may be able to move the /usr/share/games/flightgear/ off your SSD, onto your HDD. Then right click on it, and press Make Link. You can then copy that folder to /usr/share/games, rename it to flightgear, and hope it works

Answer 2

Posting to this old question as it may help others.

There doesn't seem to be any option on apt-get for this. But there is for dpkg! (Untested as I'm doing this from memory. This DOES NOT WORK for packages that install stuff in weird places.)

First download the .deb package using "sudo apt-get download chocolate-doom"

Then run sudo dpkg -i --instdir=/home/YOURUSERNAMEHERE/YOURTARGETDIRECTORYHERE chocolate-doom_2.0.0-2_amd64.deb

(or whatever your .deb is called)

As a bonus, if you want to be able to run the program from anywhere in your shell, you can edit the file "/home/YOURUSERNAME/.bashrc" and add export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/YOURTAGETDIRECTORYHERE to the end of the file.

See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HomeFolder#Installing_Software_Into_The_Home_Directory for details.

Usually people install stuff in /home/USERNAME/bin and so you'd add "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" to the end of your .bashrc file. And run sudo dpkg -i --instdir=/home/YOURUSERNAMEHERE/bin chocolate-doom_2.0.0-2_amd64.deb

WARNING. Using the following incorrectly (or even correctly) will probably destroy your system.

The man page for dpkg also has a --admindir= flag that, quote: "Change default administrative directory, which contains many files that give information about status of installed or uninstalled packages, etc. (Defaults to /var/lib/dpkg)"

So in theory, if dpkg is complaining about package conflicts and dependencies, you can use the above to build a completely separate dependency tree, containing required libraries that would otherwise conflict with your system's main libraries and dependencies. (Do not use --admindir=YOURDIR without --installdir=YOURDIR. It'll mess things up)

(Note. I have not tested this and if you do this in the wrong directory, you WILL override important files, and you WILL destroy your system. Also look at the --root=dir option in the dpkg manual page. It's probably safer than using --admindir=YOURDIR and --installdir=YOURDIR together and risk accidentally forgetting one of them, or pointing one of them to the wrong dir etc.)