Using Miniconda to install tools

February 2022

Since I started grad school in 2006, I have continuously worked in an environment with a roaming home directory. Essentially my desktop is a dummy terminal and all data and computation exist in a heterogeneous compute cluster. Typically I do not have root permissions on any machine and am limited to the applications I can install/compile as a local user.

I recently encountered an issue where a compute environment was updated, but no installation of my favorite window manager—tmux—was included. I stumbled on a simple solution that I was unaware existed. One can simply install software using miniconda. I have longed used miniconda to manage my python environments, but did not know it worked for a number of other utilities. Assuming miniconda is already installed, all you need is the following command:

conda install -c conda-forge tmux

Since discovering this it has come in handy for a number of applications like sox and octave. I love the simplicity of it, especially compared my previous solution of locally installing GCC and standard libraries.

Another modern solution is to install the applications within docker or singularity, but sometimes it is nice to run something locally without having to go through a container.