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Suppose i have a situation where i need to install a software, which is not available in repositories or Synaptic package manager...And i have the .bin file.

where should i install this file? I mean in which path?

Below are the possible situations where i need the answer

  1. I know that synaptic package manager or sudo apt-get install command installs the application in a properly place..What if the software we are looking is not available there?
  2. Suppose a situation has arised like IBM sphere has released new version of the websphere and i want to install the software on my machine without waiting for Ubuntu to bundle this version to upload on repositories..
  3. I need to know the location of the software installed via synapric/apt-get install command...I need this because if i want to set environment variables..without knowing the location..I can't do this..

EDIT: I have completely modified the context of the question

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    Can you give a good reason why you don't want want to use the official packages? (I'm sure the packagers want to know if something's wrong with their work, so that they can improve.)
    – JanC
    Nov 21, 2010 at 9:29
  • Agreed with @JanC - while it may not seem that important to you to tell us why not it certainly changes the way an answer is portrayed. For instance if you're looking for the latest JDK there's a PPA for that. If it's another reason we can help explain either how to fix or provide support for that reason. Nov 21, 2010 at 11:50
  • I take that back...My question is where(path) to install the manually downloaded SUN JDK on ubuntu like we do in Program files on wndows I am not at all questioning/challenging the efforts of packagers, who do everything for us...I am just a kid :)
    – javanoob
    Nov 21, 2010 at 11:56
  • I just want to know how to install from packages in right place..rather than depending on UI tools...I just want to get my hands rusty..
    – javanoob
    Nov 21, 2010 at 11:59

2 Answers 2

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You seem to want to install software that is not packaged in the repositories (or at least as a proper .deb) in the same location as packages that are in the repositories. That's not a good idea; those locations are managed by the package management, and you should keep them clean from manual intervention as much as possible.

Software you install from source yourself is probably best installed under /usr/local/. If you want to make it easy to update or remove such applications easily, I'd suggest you use checkinstall. This might also work for some binary packages (depending on how they are packaged).

Most commercial software I would probably install under /opt/vendor or something like that, so that it can't conflict with package management and normal open source practices.

If you need to know where a package installed by APT puts its files, you can see that in Synaptic or with dpkg -L packagename.

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  • Some thing i was looking for..Thanks for your time
    – javanoob
    Nov 22, 2010 at 4:00
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If you don't want to use the gui tools then use apt-get. Installing packages manualy into the file system is defenatly not the way to do things.

If you wanted to install it from a .sh file manually. Then use the parameters to set install path to somewhere in /opt/java or something like that. So it's not installed alongside your system packages.

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