Yes it is an installed version of Mint (rafaella it says). Superblock :-| ¿? So no /mnt/hda1 anymore ?

It's a brand-new system, so there probably won't be any directories under /mnt. Anyway, things like CDs and pen-drives are usually mounted under /media these days. /mnt is used mostly for one-off mounts made during housekeeping operations, and the administrator decides if he wants any subdirectories there.

Superblock: a special block at the beginning of a filesystem (often with scattered back-up copies) storing any special information that the kernel needs in order to read the filesystem.

1 members found this post helpful.

Aha thanks for clarifying. Now next is i did some software install with the software manager. It says it is correctly installed, but there is no icon of the program, so i thought i'll make a icon (link) myself. But where is the program installed, is there a standard directory where programs are installed to?

And it goes automatically with the gui software manager, but ofcourse i want to do it on the command line too. But first i need to know where the installed programs go to . . .

using search in the filesystem i got after 10 minutes of searching different locations of the program files. So i guess there is no particular directory for a program, it is just scattered all over the file system, some files are in /bin some in /usr/bin i see some in /usr/share and then /icons /applications /mime. Ok good to know when installing something you need to know exactly every file that is related to the program to find the files back in the filesystem, they are not in a directory with the program's name. Whoohoo it gets messy fast when installing multiple programs then, i guess...

Or maybe all the installed programs, use the /usr/share/icons/hicolor/256x256/apps directory to put their icons in, but then what if they have the same name ?¿ I go and try something out in my stonecoal english as they say here in holland.

A good package management system will keep track of these things and be able to "uninstall" the related files if required. If you're on Mint, it has a good package manager which I would encourage you to use for all installations and removals.

One little thing that i find annoying and believe me i tried every switch i could find is to use ls and have to scroll up to see the files, is there a switch that waits until a key is pressed and go to the next page when using ls ? like ahhum, dir/p ???

1 members found this post helpful.

Yes it looks very shiny, but i like to also know how to do it by hand, instead of something doing it for me. Just for the fun of it, and to understand where these files go to. To get some feeling for it, i do not know how to explain it. It is just a big dream of mine to know how to apt-get it, get it ? haha

(sorry for the poor jokes)

lol ... no problem. I have the same curious nature when it comes to stuff like that. As you have surmised, however, there is *perhaps* less of a uniform standard in linux than in Windows when it comes to where an application's files are stored. There are some common ones (you have mentioned a few) but no guarantees.

Again, no problem wanting to understand where things go and how they work (actually a good thing), but if your distro (Mint) has a package for a given application, I strongly suggest you install and manage via the package manager (apt or its GUI equivalent).

Cheers :-) !

1 members found this post helpful.

I will take your advise under advice. :-D

But less uniform? So there must be some uniform? the only logic i can think of would be putting files somewhere so other programs can share these files. And then there would be uniform directories to put these files in. So a program puts files in /usr/bin and other programs do the same, but what if they use the same filename, or probably they look at some version of the file ? But then you need to know exactly what files are used by a particular program if you want to, let's say change something. Or the version of different programs need to be the same. Pooh what to do.

Well I am off, going home, see you tomorrow, for more newbie questions, thanks for all the information and help. Have a nice evening or whatever, depends where you are on the globe i think. Bye.

Most of what you are referring to is called dependency management and is managed by the package manager. Certain applications have "dependencies" on other applications or files, similar to the Windows world's .dll files and such. The package manager is intelligent enough to verify the presence of such dependencies and only install them if they are not already present.

And yes, there is some degree of uniformity : /usr/share/applications is commonly used for .desktop files, /usr/bin for program files $HOME/.config for user space configuration files ... etc. It's just different with respect to the way Windows manages things and inherited in part, through the years, from Unix conventions.

Anyway, as you will often hear from members here, linux is not Windows, so it shouldn't be surprising that it works differently.

You're still thinking like a Windows user. In Windows, every installed program plonks an icon on your desktop, and the desktop soon becomes crowded with rows and rows of icons. Linux program developers consider it very rude to put icons on other people's desktops without asking. It's your desktop so you put the icons there if you want them. You use them only for your favorite programs. With most desktops, you do it by right-clicking and choosing new->shortcut.

Newly installed programs are usually put into your desktop menu.

Where they actually go to? The command usually goes into /usr/bin, its libraries into /usr/lib, documentation into /usr/share/doc, and any default configuration files into /etc.

Additionally you can check where the file is run from by using the which(1) command to inform you where a command line (also terminal) call finds the executable, just in case it is not running from one of the usual places.

apt-file in debian based distros is good for knowing about the files of a package.

$ apt-file list <packagename>

$ apt-file find <filename>

Without those there are other ways.

$ dpkg -c package.deb

or dpkg -x package name and find in the current path, one way to unzip a deb package from a certain POV. With ar -x and other routes too. But you need the .deb where apt-file just keeps a database of information. The advantage of using the package management system is that you can cleanly uninstall something in a semi-trusted way. Or at least keep track of what came from where. Baring dpkg-divert for the things that come from several sources.