Installing tmux on CentOS 6.2

If you haven’t used tmux, you should probably give it a try.  It is an elegant and full featured terminal multiplexer similar to GNU Screen.

If life were easy you would simply fire up yum and install the program.

$sudo yum install tmux

But if we wanted life to be easy we would be running Ubuntu.

Installing tmux on CentOS 6.2, however, is a bit tricky, but not exceptionally hard.

tmux has a library dependency on libevent which, of course, isn’t installed by default.  So you might think that you can install it using yum, again, that would be too easy.  It turns out that the libevent package you can install with yum is slightly out of date for tmux, but that is okay, we will do things the old fashioned way and install it from a tarball.

wget https://github.com/downloads/libevent/libevent/libevent-2.0.21-stable.tar.gz
tar xzvf libevent-2.0.21-stable.tar.gz
cd libevent-2.0.21-stable
./configure && make
sudo make install

Once libevent is installed there are several ways you can install tmux. I am going to pull the most recent source right from the git repo, but you can visit the tmux website and choose a different method if you like.

git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/tmux/tmux-code tmux
cd tmux
sh autogen.sh
./configure && make
sudo make install

That should do it, you are all set to start using tmux.

A good introduction to using tmux can be found in the video: An introduction to tmux, by Jack Franklin

Tags: CentOS, tmux

http://elroyjetson.org/dev-notes/centos/installing-tmux-on-centos-6-2