File location differences between Debian and other 'X'nix's?
Hi,
I chose Debian after carefully reading everything I could find and decided
that dselect and the .deb format was the better choice. One thing still puzzles
me, though, being new to UNIX in general. Debian seems to put most everything
into different places than most other 'X'nix's. This issue came up again for me
when I tried to update my sane in a valiant attempt to get my USB AGFA scanner
working. I am running a slink box, and the last time I tried updating a potato
package, after I updated libg6 to >2.1, my system crashed completely! So, I
decided, rather than try updating to sane 1.0.1 with the .deb, which would also
update libg6, I would download the source and compile and install it myself. The
sane sources installed themselves into completely different sub-directories than
the old sane was installed in, so my system still uses sane 0.74 rather than
1.0.1. Is there some reason why Debian uses such vastly different directories
for installations? Is there a document I should read that would explain the
reasoning? I had a similar problem when I installed Netscape from there own
install package, rather than the .deb because I figured that since the .deb
required downloading the actual programme from netscape, anyway, I'd just use
there own install routine. Netscape is now installed in /usr/local/netscape and
I currently just use the command /usr/local/netscape/netscape to run it because
I haven't figured out how to update my menus yet.
As you can probably tell, I'm still climbing a very steep learning curve right
now. But, I've made quite some progress and am very proud of the progress I've
made. I don't think I would have learned nearly as much if I'd chosen an easier
distribution like RedHat or OpenLinux. I'd just like to know what the reasoning
is behind the directory layout used by Debian and why most other 'X'nix's seem
to use completely different layouts?
Thanks again for all your assistance over the past year.
Cheers,
John Gay
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