I find it extremely hard to install software on a Linux machine as a regular user. I don't have root privileges on this machine, so I can't use any package manager system.
For example I'm trying to install a simple IRC client, but installing everything from source is a pain because I have to manually download and install every single dependency on the tree (irssi->glib->ncurses etc.. etc..).
So I downloaded ircii which seems to be the most minimalistic client I can find, it still requires some program called lex which I can't find.
Any easy solutions for this hassling task? Why don't people just deliver binaries that have all I need included in them (sort of like .exes)?