Hi...

can anyone post a link to a good howto, explaining how the directories are correctly used in linux?
I'm often not sure, where to install programs etc....

thx, regards and happy new year
bR0Nk0

This might be helpful:
http://www.geocities.com/lunatech300...l/howto_4.html

this was indeed helpful.
thx alot

bR0Nk0

Directory structure and using depend on you distributive.

No, it is usually almost same in all distros.

Here is a link to a pdf reference manual for the "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard"
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.2.pdf

Normally, when you install a program from a source tarball, the last step is to as root, type: make install. This will install the software components were they need to go.

In a general sense it's true - everybody's got an /etc - but in details only certain things are consistent or compliant and a lot of things are not. I mean, even at a root level, Debian tends to want to create mount point directories for removable drives in /, while most put them under /mnt, and some don't put them anywhere but leave it to the user. The /opt, /usr, /usr/local areas are particularly fuzzy from distro to distro.

As far as where to install programs, packages often go where they want to go and I redirect source compiles (except on Gentoo, where everything is) to /usr/local - which is where they're supposed to go by default but not all do.

For the home user, it hardly matters, though - most of Linux's directory structure is overly complex and dependent on multi-user multi-machine assumptions with users who can't be root and so on. Still, Slackware won't clobber /usr/local in an upgrade, iirc.