On Thursday 29 January 2004 18.37, Rem P Roberti wrote:
Yesterday I downloaded and installed Mozilla 1.6. It works perfectly and I'm pleased so far. The program currently resides in my home directory. I have the feeling (don't know why) that this isn't a good idea.
It all depends. If it's a single user machine, or a multi user machine but you're only installing for yourself, then $HOME is an excellent idea.
So my newbie question: is there a specific directory where programs such as Mozilla should be stored after installation? Something tells me that there is some kind of convention or protocol in Linux as to where folders from new installations should reside. I would appreciate knowing if this is true, and why it might be true.
There is a standard called the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) which you can find at http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ It says, briefly, that if you're installing software that doesn't come from your OS vendor, then you should install it in either /opt or /usr/local The main reason for this is to ease upgrades. An upgrade is free, according to the standard, to totally erase any directories except /home, /opt, /srv and /usr/local