Filesystem Hierarchy Standard

General
bin	Essential command binaries boot	Static files of the boot loader dev	Device files etc	Host-specific system configuration lib	Essential shared libraries and kernel modules media	Mount point for removeable media mnt	Mount point for mounting a filesystem temporarily opt	Add-on application software packages sbin	Essential system binaries srv	Data for services provided by this system tmp	Temporary files usr	Secondary hierarchy var	Variable data

Manual Compilation
Sometimes you'll want to compile software manually. This is how to do that:

Get Sources
wget the tarball to whereever, and extract it to : tar -xzf foo-1.2.3.tar.gz -C /usr/local/src or tar -xjf foo-1.2.3.tar.bz2 -C /usr/local/src

Configuration
cd /usr/local/src/foo-1.2.3 Check installation documentation: less README Check the configuration options with ./configure --help|less and then ./configure --prefix=/usr/local [any other options]

Compilation and Installation
make && make install