some general questions
 

Hey there!
I have been using linux for awhile and i have a few basic questions:

i have apt and synaptic, and installed gaim from that. then i noticed that i cant get the latest 0.82-1.

Sooo brave as i am, i decided to build it from source. (yay)
so i do that and it works fine....

now i have my old gaim install in usr/bin and my new one in usr/local/bin

1)how do i uninstall my new installation again, or any program for that matter?
2) and then how do i install the new one (built from source) to usr/bin?
3) what is the difference between the two dirs?
4) once installed, can i delete the source in my home dir?
5) i compiled blender from source too with scons, and the binary is now in my home dir. how can i move installations without messing it up? id like it to be in the usr/bin, too.

thanks for your help!!!

Christoph

If you installed gaim with apt, then it came in as an RPM. That's a RedHat's package... Usually, you install a binary package that has the program and libraries compiled.

You can use apt to uninstall the packaged version. Or, "rpm -e packagename" will do it.

To remove a built-from-source program could be a bit trickier... If you haven't deleted the source dir that you ran ./configure, make, and make install in, you can cd back into the dir and run make uninstall. That will reverse the installation process and remove everything it installed. If you did delete the dir, then you could rerun the installation up to make install, and run make uninstall. That might work.

There isn't a whole lot of difference in /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin ... Both a standard dirs to hold executables that anybody is normally able to run. Sometimes, people see /usr/bin as the very basic install dir, and use /usr/local/bin for custom-installed programs.

To change the dir a built-from-source program installs to, you normally add an option to the ./configure command. You can check with ./configure --help to see what you can configure. It would be something like ./configure -prefix=/usr/bin .

You might want to save the source dir for a bit, until you make sure the program is running and what you really want. If not, uninstall it as above.

Not sure what it would take to move blender... It might be as simple as moving the executable to /usr/local/bin , and making sure the executable has its permissions set to allow anybody to run it. Or, you might try reconfiguring with options to install it system-wide.

Thanks that explains alot!

I think i will uninstall the apt-installed gaim and reinstall it from source.

how would i save my personal setttings?

oh and what if i installed the source compiled one over the old on into usr/bin with prefix=/usr ?