Just wondering where everyone puts their files such as tarballs etc which they dont install using dpkg. I read that dpkg doesnt touch the directory /usr/local/src and that one should install such files from there and then binaries, libraries and config files around as needed. So what do you recommend?

Thanks.

For the tarballs themselves, I generally download them into either a dedicated Downloads directory or my home directory (they almost always get moved to the downloads folder later though). When it comes to compiling them though, I'll decompress them to /usr/src as this is the standard location for such things. When I just want to uncompress the archives without compiling or installing them (say, I want to get a specific file out of the archive or just poke through the contents) or experiment with things such as patches, I'll decompress to /tmp.

/usr/local is where everything you don't want messed with (but you want globally available) to go. I believe by default anyone in the staff group can do anything with those files. So normal users can do global installs into /usr/local if they are in that group.

Thanks for the input! I am still very noobish when it comes to installing tarballs. Just takes some time to understand where certain files should go in the file system.

For installing tarballs, ./configure --prefix=/usr/local is your friend (though in a lot of instances /usr/local is what the default prefix is anyway ... specify it just to be on the safe side).