Idefisk without fuss

Idefisk is an IAX Voice over IP client. It’s a nice little program that runs without fuss. The only thing that’s bugging me a bit is its installation procedure in Linux. You have to unpack a tarball, then copy a library to a system directory (as root), then run a command (as root) and then you can start Idefisk.

I generally don’t want to mix third-party libraries with system libraries nor do I want to execute anything as root unless I really have to, and there is no reason why you should. Idefisk can run just fine without performing any command as the root user. Place the below script in your Idefisk dir, make it executable (“chmod +x idefisk.sh”) and run it. No more root required!

The contents of the script are quite straightforward:

#!/bin/bash

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(dirname $0)
$LD_LIBRARY_PATH/idefisk