Can someone please give me a quick guide as to where to install (BTW i never used RPM) programs or drivers ? most linux docs just talk about how to install, untar etc which is fairly self explanetary . .

I have just installed a driver for something and am sure that it doesnt work becos of how i installed it. I normally untar in my home directory and then install from there, this is because i still have a windows mentality of click install and everything will be sorted. I am the only user on my machine so doing this is okay for now but i guess is probly a bad habit

-What is the significance of the place i run 'make' or 'make install' from ?

-I dont want my home directory full of untarred directories, shouldn't i be putting them somewhere nice and tidy (like in windows the program directory)

thanks

it's perfectly fine to untar and compile in your home directory. It might be a good habit to have ~/source directory or something like that where all the sources go. The programs themselves get installed elsewhere. This happens at the
make install
step. When you run ./configure in the source tree, you can specify where the program is to be installed. Usually, the default is /usr/local. In Mandrake I find that it is often better to use /usr, especially when replacing rpm versions with self-compiled ones. So in my case I do
./configure --prefix=/usr
and then make && make install. You can use
./configure --help
to find all the other options there are. Sometimes very useful. Also, you need to be root to install a program outside your home directory.

in most cases you wont need the source code after installation, so you can actually delete the directory where you did "make" and "make install", the actual binaries generally speaking gets installed somewhere in /usr
But one good reason to keep the source codes in one place is so that you can tell what you've installed and possibly do a "make uninstall" when necessary.
Or you might want to consider changing distro to something like Gentoo, let the portage system handle the management of the source codes for you.

ok thanks. so basically (and without using RPM) i dont have to think about where things are being installed (although obviously i do) since make install will take care of everything for me. Thats great !