我如何在CentOS 6.5上创建一个可以使用最新的shell，diff，vim等的环境？

Question

I ssh to a CentOS 6.5 system, where I have root privileges.

I know that CentOS is intentionally limited to very old versions of the kernel and the commands so that software running on it, especially server software, is very reliable. I don't want to interfere with any of that.

But while I'm logged in as myself, I want all the commands I use to be the latest versions that can possibly run on this version of CentOS.

To that end I want to make a folder tree called /latest that has its own bin, etc, lib, and so on, so that with my PATH and ld environment variables set to point into this tree, I can run the latest versions of coreutils and other software. Especially, I want to be able to use yum to keep the tree up to date (without touching the CentOS versions of anything). More or less like this:

PATH=/latest/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
yum update
yum install zsh

It seems to me that it must be possible to make a script that would set up a /latest folder like this so that yum can take it from there, but I can't find anything like that anywhere.

What sort of rabbit hole might this approach lead to?

Answer 1

You could install a recent Linux distribution in a chroot -ed environment (perhaps using schroot if it exists).

You could also compile recent versions of software from their source code. You probably want to have a directory $HOME/soft/ then

 configure --prefix=$HOME/soft

You might consider ugrading the distribution on your server (if you have the appropriate permissions from the machine owner).