I teach 109

You should be aware of the Lee and Turing servers. You may or may not have access to Lee but most people can get on Turing, and CS students are probably instructed to use it for course related to work. Unfortunately using a remote linux server to do any “work” without a terminal multiplexer is less than ideal. I believe Turing does have screen installed, but who wants to use that ancient relic in 2013. What you really want is tmux which is of course not there. Why would it be there? Why make life easy to the users when we can make them suffer.

How do we do this? Well, it is simple. First we need to decide where to install it. Since we don’t have (and will never have) root, we need to install it in the home directory. Personally I don’t like polluting the ~ itself, so I recommend installing into a subdirectory like ~/local for example:

mkdir ~/local
export TARGET_DIR="$HOME/local"

The second line creates a temporary environment variable we will be using in the compilation process below. Please be aware that it will go away once you log out, unless you put it in your .bashrc.

First order of business is to get prerequisites. Fortunately, last time I checked Turing had almost everything needed to successfully compile tmux except a small library known as libevent. So before we do the main install, we need to grab and compile that:

wget https://github.com/downloads/libevent/libevent/libevent-2.0.15-stable.tar.gz
tar xf libevent-2.0.15-stable.tar.gz
cd libvent-2.0.15-stable
./configire --prefix="$TARGET_DIR" --disable-shared
make
make install

Make sure you use the --prefix argument when you run the configure script, otherwise the installation will fail. This argument specifies that we want to install it locally. The --disable-shared enforces static linking, which is what we want in this case.

Once compilation finishes you should be ready to install tmux proper:

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/tmux/tmux-1.5.tar.gz
 tar xf tmux-1.5.tar.gz
 cd tmux-1.5

./configure CPPFLAGS="-I$TARGET_DIR/include -I$TARGET_DIR/include/ncurses" \
            CFLAGS="-I$TARGET_DIR/include -I$TARGET_DIR/include/ncurses" \
            LDFLAGS="-I$TARGET_DIR/include -L$TARGET_DIR/include -L$TARGET_DIR/include/ncurses -L$TARGET_DIR/lib" \
            --prefix="$TARGET_DIR"
make
make install

Yes, I know - that is a lot of compilation flags. That’s because tmux is a complex app, and compiling and statically linking it in your home directory takes some gentle “convincing”. The above however is verified to work, at least on Turing.

At this point you should add ~/local/bin to your $PATH and you will be ready to roll. I don’t think I have a primer on using tmux anywhere, but if you want to take a peek at my personal tmux.conf file, you can find it here.