Installing binaries

[Matthew Miller]

On Mon, May 23, 2005 at 08:54:26AM +0300, Dotan Cohen wrote:
> I have been loking at Nedit and want to install it- but it is
> available only as a binary. After googleing around a bit, I found that
> in most distros binaries should be installed in /usr/local/bin, but in
> redhat based distros this is different. So how/where should I install
> this?

I think there's a misunderstanding in the information you've found.
"/usr/local/bin" is traditionally for locally-installed programs as opposed
to those that come with the operating system. For Linux, where distributions
include huge collections of software, this line is blurred. So generally, it
works this way: anything installed via the system's package management
software, RPM, should put binaries in /usr/bin. You don't have (much)
control over this -- it basically depends on how the .rpm package was
constructed. And anything you compile and don't make an RPM from, put in
/usr/local/bin (so that it doesn't get in the way of the package management
system).



> Also, whenever I download any program, I install it by moving it into
> /usr/local/bin and running it from there. That's rpm's, perl programs,
> and anything else. Is this wrong (or right)?

I'm not sure I'm reading you right here. Are you saying you'd copy
someprogram-1.0-1.i386.rpm to /usr/local/bin?


-- 
Matthew Miller           mattdm at mattdm.org        <http://www.mattdm.org/>
Boston University Linux      ------>                <http://linux.bu.edu/>
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