Semi-technical thoughts

Sorry, it's not a complete instruction, just a thought. It occurred to me (some time ago) that Python's virtualenv is, essentially, a simplified version of system "prefix", it has bin, lib, include, and can have more stuff when needed. If you're willing to experiment (you'll probably have to set a few additional environment variables and/or build flags but that's no big deal), you can install various other tools there up until you have a complete system with its own compiler and complete set of libraries although it's much simpler to keep using system compiler and libraries only complimenting them when needed. Granted, prefixes are nothing new, people were using /opt (and their home directory) this way since the beginning of time. But with little help of virtualenv-wrapper or pyenv you can easily switch between them and isolate environments better. Binaries and stuff installed in virtualenv would override system defaults but only when venv is activat...

It often happens that you need to echo or cat something to some config file, or maybe a log, or something else owned by root. It also often happens that you try to run it as a regular user and get a permission denied error. And normally you'd just prepend your command with sudo and be done with it, but output redirects are not that easy: current shell will handle them itself, they will not be passed to sudo and you will still have your permission problem. Luckily, the fix is easy: instead of prepending the command, you just replace > somefile with | sudo tee somefile and >> somefile with | sudo tee -a somefile  whatever the command before was. You may also add > /dev/null if you don't want if to echo everything. Example: echo "truncated" | sudo tee /var/log/toolong.log echo "additional log record" | sudo tee -a /var/log/toolong.log Of course, this is not the only way and it's not always the best but it works all the time, it...