Debian Questions

[Gaijin]

On Mon, Aug 04, 2008 at 12:59:46PM -0400, Robert Spangler wrote:
> But when I do an aptitude update then aptitude full-upgrade, won't it  
> overwrite my custom installed packages?

	The Linux Standards Base (LSB) is a good set of guidelines to
get familiar with for the future.  The / directory, with bin, sbin, lib,
etc, etc., are generally reserved for the bare-bones operating system to
support single-user mode operations, AFAIK.  /usr is commonly reserved
for multi-user mode operations support.  /usr/local is reserved for
personal changes to the system by the administrator and are usually
referenced first in the PATH variable, so if you add a different version
of FireFox, it should be the first copy looked for in the /usr/lovcal
heirarchy.  /opt is a special case heirarchy commonly reserved for
commercial software, or at least it was back in 2002 when I last
consulted the LSB.  Debian makes some assumptions on what would be the
default browser in either the CLI or the GUI, and may ignore the PATH
variable in this instance.  I would check the binary in /usr/bin to see
if it's a boot script or not to be sure., or see what symlinks are set
up in /etc/alternatives (I know the first thing I do is change
/etc/alternatives/editor to point to vim, rather than nano).  Under most
conditions, if you put a copy of something in /usr/local, the PATH
variable will cause that and not the Debian installed copy to execute
first.  HTH,

			Michael