Installing software on Linux without root privileges

You can install software into your own home directory. If you're comfortable compiling from source, and the package uses automake, then you can use the following option on configure:

--prefix=$HOME/install

or whatever. Similarly, rpm has a prefix option as well. However, this only works if the rpm was built to be relocatable.

I use JuJu which basically allows to have a really tiny linux distribution (containing just the package manager) inside your $HOME/.juju directory.

It allows to have your custom system inside the home directory accessible via proot and, therefore, you can install any packages without root privileges. It will run properly to all the major linux distributions, the only limitation is that JuJu can run on linux kernel with minimum reccomended version 2.6.32.

For instance, after installed JuJu to install pip just type the following:

$>juju -f
(juju)$> pacman -S python-pip
(juju)> pip