[ILUG] Newbie Question: Installing software on RH

[Phil]

Justin MacCarthy's [macarthy at iol.ie] 32 lines of dribble included:
> Hi people,
> 
> I have a question about the installation of software. I'm running RH6.* and
> so far using rpm to install software ... rpm -ivh <package>.rpm as root.
> 
> However /usr is becoming full (97%) whereas  /usr/local is empty so
> obviously this is a problem. I'm pretty new to Linux so be gentle.
> 
> So my question is: What should my general strategy for installing new
> software ???
> I'm a little confused :-)
> 
> 
> df
>     Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
>      /dev/hda1 66333 50719 12189 81% /
>     /dev/hda7 50717 2395 45703 5% /boot
>     /dev/hda5 1162695 20651 1081969 2% /home
>     /dev/hda9 398124 364906 12657 97% /usr
>     /dev/hda8 991000 32 939765 0% /usr/local
>     /dev/hda10 242015 6945 222573 3% /var
Nearly all "new" software will be installed into /usr/local (or at least
software which is installed locally, hence the name)
It is generally a convention that software in /usr/local/ is accessible by
users of your box.
There is a filesystem heirarchy standard[1] which is probably the best thing to
follow. /usr seems a little full to me (70-80 per cent would probably be best)
but you could still get by, by installing everything into /usr/local/
Also if this box of yours is to be used at home, /home seems a little big and
you might be better off dedicating some of that space to your /usr and/or
/usr/local system.
Philip.
[1] http://www.pathname.com/fhs/2.0/fhs-toc.html