First up thanks for your help!

I am relatively new to linux and i have found these forums invaluable.

My problem is i dont know enough about linux to set up the environment variables for ns. i downloaded ns-allinone-2.27 for one of my uni subjects, and although i have been searching these forums i have yet to find a clear answer to my problem.

i downloaded the package, unzipped it - all this is done as root, and in roots home directory. i installed with the good old ./install. It states clearly in the documentation that the environment variables must be set of this program will not work. Here is exactly what it wants.

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(1) You MUST put /root/ns-allinone-2.27/otcl-1.8, /root/ns-allinone-2.27/lib,
into your LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable.
If it complains about X libraries, add path to your X libraries
into LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
If you are using csh, you can set it like:
setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH <paths>
If you are using sh, you can set it like:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<paths>

(2) You MUST put /root/ns-allinone-2.27/tcl8.4.5/library into your TCL_LIBRARY environmental
variable. Otherwise ns/nam will complain during startup.

(3) [OPTIONAL] To save disk space, you can now delete directories tcl8.4.5
and tk8.4.5. They are now installed under /root/ns-allinone-2.27/{bin,include,lib}

After these steps, you can now run the ns validation suite with
cd ns-2.27; ./validate

For trouble shooting, please first read ns problems page
http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/ns-problems.html. Also search the ns mailing list archive
for related posts.
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Although i am new to linux, i am not an idiot (not a complete one anyway ),
i have been toying with the export path command but i feel i am making a mess of it.


So to recap, i downloaded it to the /root directory, i installed it there, how *exactly* should i set the above enviroment variables under FC2??

and yes i know i should not do everything as root, however as a side question, my feeling is installing this program in the /root directory is a bad idea, if i am right, WHY is it a bad idea?

Incidently i have also been to the official site and look at help FAQ's etc, these seem to geared for people who find enviroment varaible setting a trivial affair - well maybe i will after i get some help from here


Many thanks for your help people ! - and if this is in the wrong forum i apologize.