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
