Installation owner
The user who installs the client products is the owner of the installation.
The standard way to install client products is as the superuser informix with administrative privileges.
UNIX, Linux , Mac OS X
You can install client products as the superuser informix or as a non-root user.
User informix is required for root-based installations because it has the unique user identifier (UID) to manage client products, as well as the database server. The installation program automatically creates the user informix and the group informix. If you previously installed a root-based Informix® product on the computer, user and group informix already exist.
You can install the client products as a non-root user. Then the user account that performs the non-root installation is the owner of the installation. However, you cannot perform a non-root installation of a client product in an $INFORMIXDIR directory that has a standard, root-based installation of the Informix server.
If you are installing client products on a platform that does not support Java, you must manually create the user informix and the group informix. For instructions, see Creating the group informix and user informix (UNIX, Linux).
Windows
You must have Administrator privileges to install client products. If you log on to Windows without specifying a domain, only the local system is checked. The user informix is created during the installation as a member of the Administrator group.