How to Organize my File/Folders in Linux?

Question

Hi All, I am Using Fedora 10, I would like to organize my files and folders?

ie:

Suppose I got a .bin file it automatically install all files properly, we don't want to bothered about anything. (Like windows all the files are into the "c:\Program Files"). But in Linux Which is the path for the install files.

One of my installation goes to '/usr/local/Zend/ZendStudio-5.5.0' but this is .bin file.

If i got an extract package where do i put the extracted folders. (firefox.tar.gz is a package but we just need to extract that to run. in this case where is the proper location to extract these kind of installation files ).

I think it bit difficult to understand my English. if you have any doubt please ask me.

Answer 1

The convention is to put the installed programs either into /usr/local/bin (or /usr/local/PROGRAM if it's complex enough) or ~/bin (rather than /usr/bin so you don't clobber precompiled packages installed by your software manager (yum, apt, w/e)).

Normally, if you were to compile from source and use the configure script, it would install into /usr/local by default (binaries would go to /usr/local/bin, .so's to /usr/local/lib, etc. If you wanted to override it, normally you would do something like

./configure --prefix=/usr

Also this is a great document summarizing the Linux file system layout standards: http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html