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Nov 19 2007

A newbie’s questions about Ubuntu and the filesystem

Posted by: bigbolshevik in Ubuntu

In reply to my Youtube video of "Where did my installed program go on Ubuntu?", I recieved the following question:

May I ask a doubt. In Windows, when you install a program, everything
comes up in the folder where its installed (eg. Program Files) and
everything is pretty straight forward.

In
Linux, I don’t understand where the files are going and what are the
.exe equivalents in Linux ? And, its quite annoying that I get access
to only the home folder (I mean, even if get full access, its really
confusing whats going on) :(

My answer
The files go all over the filesystem. Depending on what you’ve installed, files could go into /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /lib, /sbin, /var… there are a lot of places that files can go.

But you don’t need to know where these files go. If you ever do, go into the Synaptic Package Manager as I do in this tutorial and look for yourself! The Linux way (where a program will put files in all sorts of different places) is better as it allows other programs to use the same files - less duplication, less bloat.

This message is too short for a tour of the filesystem, but it’s easier than it looks. /bin is for the basic programs that make the computer run. /boot contains the kernel of the operating system. /lib contains basic libraries that your programs need to run. /home contains home directories. /etc contains a lot of miscellaneous stuff, including configuration files for basic parts of the system. /usr/bin contains your everyday programs. /usr/share contains miscellaneous stuff that your everyday programs require, as does /usr/lib. /var contains some other stuff; the most interesting are /var/apt/ and /var/www (the latter is where web pages get served from, if you have Apache installed). /sbin contains programs that can only be run by root (the administration account - the one that you must use "sudo" or "gksudo" to get into). Finally, /tmp contains temporary files which get wiped on shutdown.

Linux doesn’t rely on file extensions like .exe to know what is executable and what isn’t. If you open up your file browser to the /usr/bin or /bin directories, you’ll see what is executable by what icon it has. If you’re using Ubuntu, it will be a purple diamond icon. Otherwise, it might have the extension ".sh" or ".run".

Ubuntu’s security mechanism prevents you, malicious programs, and prankster colleagues from modifying the filesystem without your authorisation. Go to the terminal or the Alt-F2 Run dialog and type "gksudo nautilus". From there you should have read/write access to everything. But 99.99% of the time you don’t need to directly touch anything outside your home directory.

If there’s something in particular that you’re trying to get access to your filesystem for, tell me and I’ll see if it’s something that can be done more safely another way. But you’ve really got to remember that Linux is a completely different operating system to Windows, and if you don’t understand yet, it’s not because it’s necessarily more difficult - it’s just not what you’re used to.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 1:19 am and is filed under Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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