🚀 go-pugleaf

first off, learn to format your lines to under 80 columns.  There's an
excellent paragraph formatter called par which works well with vi, or
you can use fmt which usually comes with most vi implementations.

Matthew Hyne <mjhyne@cleveland.com.au> writes:

> I am learning by experience.

welcome to linux :-)

> What directories should I install my applications in.  Is there a
> recognised format.
>
> ie /usr/apps/netscape , /usr/apps/database.
>
> I notice that on a lot of systems they lump all the bins into one
> directory - this is a bit of trouble if you want to upgrade something
> later isn't it. I have just been linking the executables from this
> directory to where they are really stored.
>
> Can someone suggest a directory stucture for me to follow.

/bin, /usr/bin, and /usr/local/bin are the correct directories for
general purpose / application binaries.  Support files for same
generally belong under /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib.

your problem is not that all binaries are in the same directory (this is
the way things are supposed to be<tm>).  

Your problem is that you are using a broken distribution of linux
(probably slackware) which does not have a package management system to
allow easy upgrades of any or all binaries.

Ditch Slackware and go for Debian.  Or redhat - redhat's packaging
system is almost as good as Debian's (but it doesn't understand
conflicts or dependancies between packages yet).

IMO, Slackware is why some *BSD users tend to snigger at linux users and
have an unjustifiable and infuriating self-satisfied smugness :-). It's
wrong to judge Linux by one bad distribution, but if that's all they've
seen then that's all they'll know.


> Also, how can I boot a diskless workstation (or one with a small disk)
> from another Linux machine (over the LAN) and then use NIS to setup the
> passwd etc.  I don't need to have a full copy of linux on the machine
> do I ???

No, you don't need a full copy of linux.  All you need is an ethernet
card with a boot prom (or a boot floppy with a kernel compiled to allow
NFS mounting of the root fs).

There are various howto documents available on the net which go into some
detail.  If you installed linux from a cd, your cd probably has copies of
these docs on it somewhere.  If not, go out and spend $25 on a copy of the
Infomagic Linux 5 CD set (or is it 6 CDs in the set these days?).  Anyway,
it's money well spent.

If you're going to install Debian then DON'T, whatever you do, install
it from the November 1995 Infomagic 5 CD set.  Infomagic stuffed up and
put an alpha pre-release version of debian 1.0 on that cd rather than
the stable release version of 0.93r6.  I hear they got it right in later
sets but I haven't bought one for a while...

Debian 1.1 is now in code freeze (bug fixes only, no new stuff) and
public beta test.  Don't be put off by "beta" status - it's at least as
reliable and stable as slackware.

Craig