KyleFuller.co.uk

This was a useful guide I wrote back on my old website. I was trying to install irssi, and I couldn't remember how I installed it last time. Luckily it was available on archive.org's WayBackMachine. I have updated this guide to glib-2.19.8 and irssi-0.8.12.

To install irssi, you can eigher follow the next 7 steps and install from source. Or you could download the binary I compiled here.

Every command on this page should be entered into a SSH Prompt on DreamHost

SSH into your Dreamhost server (for me, this is titan.dreamhost.com, you can find your server inside panel)

Create the necessary directories:

mkdir bin lib tmp
chmod 777 tmp
chmod 755 bin lib

Adding lines to your ~/.bash_profile

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" >> ~/.bash_profile
echo "export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/lib/pkgconfig" >> ~/.bash_profile
echo "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/lib:/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" >> ~/.bash_profile

Activate the new changes

source ~/.bash_profile

Download, untar, and install glib

cd ~/tmp
wget ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/glib/2.19/glib-2.19.8.tar.gz
tar -xvzf glib-2.19.8.tar.gz
cd glib-2.19.8
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Download and install irssi

cd ~/tmp
wget http://irssi.org/files/irssi-0.8.12.tar.gz
tar -xvvzf irssi-0.8.12.tar.gz
cd irssi-0.8.12
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Clean up

rm -rf ~/tmp/glib-2.19.8.tar.gz ~/tmp/glib-2.19.8 ~/tmp/irssi-0.8.12.tar.gz ~/tmp/irssi-0.8.12

Once you have installed it, simply type irssi to run it.

I asked Dreamhost if they would allow the use of a terminal application running all the time. Here is their response:

You won’t be in “trouble” for running an irc program (no servers) on our servers. However if the system becomes unstable, it would likely be one of the first processes killed by our admins as our servers are meant for hosting web pages only. In general , we just don’t want users running bots or their own server daemons on our servers.”