Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Julia on a multi-user system

Had occasion to install Julia on a multi-user system today. I downloaded the tarball to my own directory and ran Make. The instructions say that the install is fully contained in the single directory, so you don't have to worry about files being installed in different locations on the system. Once it finished, I moved the directory to a globally accessible location and tried it out. It worked mostly, but nothing about the package

manager would run properly. Eventually I realized that if the directory that I had initially created existed, the package manager worked, but if I deleted it, the package manager stopped working. 

I deleted everything, recreated the directory in its final, globally available location, and ran Make again. Success! Apparently something in that compile process is looking to see what directory it is in and going back to it for data. I'd like to know what that is.


Tuesday, October 13, 2020

WSL permissions bits

Conflicts between Linux permissions and Windows permissions are a perennial problem for people who switch back and forth between WSL and Windows. One thing that helps is, when mounting a drive, to provide the -o metadata parameter to make sure that files have both Windows and Linux permission bits:

$ sudo mount -t drvfs g: /mnt/g -o metadata

Here's some good information about how WSL permissions work:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/chmod-chown-wsl-improvements/