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javanoob
Asked: 2010-11-22 00:03:06 +0800 CST

How & Where to install softwares that are not available in repositories/synaptic package manager?

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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

java

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    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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  2. 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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