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Julian Hall wrote: | | TBH I did (probably) the same as Anton. When I installed Thunderbird and | Firefox from tarball I put them both in the /home/julian directory not | knowing at the time there was a specific place in the hierarchy they ought | to go.
~From tarball I might do the same for a single user system, as it keeps self built software away from parts of the system managed by the packaging system.
Although of course Debian Sarge has packages for Thunderbird and Firefox, so I use those.
| Having said that, it follows my old habit from Windows days of not | letting a program default where *it* wants to go. My reason for this is | simply if (or when knowing my luck ;)) the OS gets hosed, by installing to | /home/julian, which is mounted to a separate partition., I don't lose any of | my programs or customisation, which if I understand the hierarchy correctly,
Your OS shouldn't get hosed nearly as often, but being designed as a multiuser system most end user customisations are in $HOME anyway, usually in files prefixed with a "." to hide them out of the way.
It is only the system wide settings that go in /etc (and a few other places alas), and unless you are managing a network of similar boxes, or a system with a lot of users, you don't generally need to customise much in /etc.
| I would if I installed to /usr/bin etc. Is this a correct conclusion, or | would I not lose anything in the /usr/bin folder (bearing in mind that IS on | the same partition as the rest of the OS.
Just depends how you reinstall - but in general if you value it, back it up, no matter where it is on disk. I make a tar of everything to tape every now and then.
| If the answer is "yes I would lose it", is it adviseable to create separate | partitions for / /home *and* /usr? Thinking as I ask I suspect the | answer will be "yes" but I'd appreciate expert opinion :)
I suspect most "cock ups" will wipe out all the paritions if they are on the same physical disk, partitioning is more useful in minimising the damage when an application or subsystem messes up.
For example when we built one of the Redhat boxes at work we had different partitions for email queues, email boxes, websites, log files, databases etc. That way if the email system goes mad, it shouldn't affect any of the other systems when the email queue directory fills up.
As such multiple partitions don't gain much on end user / single user systems. Although again if you are managing a lot of such boxes you want to weight the chances of a failure of one subsystem, stopping everything (out of disk space can be painful), versus the effort in managing extra partitions (the more little partitions, the more often they fill up, but the less that breaks when it happens).
The downside of leaving apps in $HOME is all too often they have the wrong permissions, so could in theory become infected by a virus, or a careless mouse action in your filemanager could move the applications into the wrong directory, breaking your icons etc.
There is another convention in the Unix world, where an application get put in "/opt", often with it's own user to own the files and directories. So you'd end up with /opt/myapp/etc /opt/myapp/bin and so on. This is very useful if you want to make the application available via NFS to a number of servers, as you need only export /opt/myapp to the other servers. Indeed NFS can support fail-over application servers, where several servers all export /opt/myapp, and the client mount the fastest responding server. This is one of the reason that many admins on large networks insist on relocatable RPMs, which can be installed under any hierarchy (and the application still works!), so they can install it on application servers, or just create a partition to keep it well seperated from the rest of the OS.
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