Compiling/Installing as a non-admin user

Hello All

Me and my professor are planning to work upon machine learning in
postgresql over tsearch2. So I have some questions:

We have a server where Postgresql is running without any problem with
postgres username and admin rights. I have a user account in that
server. I plan to compile and run another postgresql for our testing so
I was thinking of how to do that? My prior knowledge of using postgresql
has always been as admin where I have full rights.

As I see, using the default MAKE for postgresql will set the data
directory etc. in /usr/local/data etc which I dont have access to as a user.

So I would like to compile and run postgresql as a normal user with
every thing like data kept in my usr directory. I should be able to run
the instance over separate port and can start and stop it.

Basically, I want to run the server as in user mode....

How should I configure the MAKE and INSTALL in this circumstances? What
are your suggestions....

Ritesh