Installing without root access

[ldenby]

Hi,

I've almost managed to install Spotify without having root access to the computer I am currently on (Ubuntu 10.04 x86). What I mean by this is that I have extracted the contents of the .deb-file, and manged to get the correct PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH so that the executable will start, however it seems that Spotify is unable to find it's own shared components (e.g. the theme images, and font files).

I have extracted the .deb-file to my home-directory so that "usr/" recides in ~, and set up the following environment variables:

PATH=~/usr/bin # so that the "spotify" executable is in path

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/usr/share/spotify # so that ld may find e.g. the "libcef.so" library

It seems that Spotify is hardcoded to look for its shared components in /usr/share, is the some enviroment variable that I can set so that Spotify looks in ~/usr/share as well?

[svamp]

Yes, it is currently hardcoded. We have some ideas to make it more standalone in a future update, but I don't think there is anything you can do with the current version to get it working. 😕

[Per_]

My colleagues and I also have the same issue.

In my office we're probably a few hundred regular Spotify users on Fedora 12 without superuser-access. So we use the Windows-version with an outdated version of wine (which is most likely the cause of all the random crashes, for example when accessing some playlists)

It'd be great if Spotify shipped self-contained like all other commercial software we're using on Linux (Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Naiad, Renderman, etc).

They all have the following structure:
Application
    - bin
        - Binary
        - Wrapper shell script that sets up necessary environment variables like $LD_LIBRARY_PATH and then calls binary
    - lib
        - All app-specific libraries
        - All 3rd party libraries like Qt, libav, etc
 
All gui-based applications are Qt-based and read themes/preferences from ~/.config/Company/configfile


These software are typically only certified on Red Hat but since they ship with all necessary components they work on all common distros.
Apart from licensing, the only tweak normally required when installing is to edit the wrapper shell script to point to the correct path (if installing to a non-standard location).

/Per

[micael_carvalho]

Is there any update on this issue? Still not possible to install Spotify on Linux without root access? Sounds a little radical to ask for root.