installing software to places like /usr/local

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Thursday 14 December 2006 11:32 pm, Simon Schuster wrote:
> I'm really new to all this, so I'm unclear of how even to check if
> it's possible, but for instance, I'm installing the java runtime
> environment from the self-extracting .bin 

It's probably possible, though I didn't bother, since I'm the only user on 
this machine now that I kicked everyone else off to another server.

> ... and I'm realizing how 
> much of this sort of thing will have to end up in my home directory,
> or does sudo also take care of the write permissions? not that this is
> a problem, it will just result in a really mucked up home directory
> and a distant, alien and unused /usr one. :)

I just have Sun's Java thingie, the Real Player, and probably the Flash plugin 
installed in ~, so unless you have much greater needs for unfriendly 
pre-compiled binary nonsense than I do, you probably don't have that much to 
worry about.  (Unless you have multiple users.)

If the installer for whatever proprietary bit of nonsense is too stupid to put 
something in /usr/local then you can almost certainly get it to run from 
there after moving it yourself.  You want to make the directories and 
executable files 755 (-rwxr-xr-x), and all the data 644 (-rw-r--r--).

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre