After a long battle with technology, der.hans wrote:
> Am 05. Mai, 2008 schwatzte Josef Lowder so:
>> My system is Mandriva 2006 so I don't think apt-get will work and
>> I do not have Synaptic on this system.

Package management has probably improved a lot on later Mandrake releases.

>> So, I wonder if they meant I was supposed to extract the tarball in
>> '/' rather than '/root' ... and I wonder if there is any risk in
>> trying to do that since there are already existing directories by
>> the same names in the top '/' directory.

I did this last week for a package that has no Gentoo ebuild.  rpm2targz 
followed by extracting the tarball to / , and it worked.

> I'm certain they mean /. I consider that to be bad form.

It is bad form.

> If you're going to just extract it, then extract it in /usr/local instead.
> After extracting into /usr/local you might need to run ldconfig to make
> sure your system knows about new libraries. You might also need to adjust
> your PATH to include /usr/local/bin

Running ldconfig is a good idea, but normal users' PATHs should already 
include /usr/local/bin/ .  What you'll probably have to do is manually move 
some stuff around after you unpack the tarball in /usr/local/ , since the 
tarball will probably extract some things to /usr/local/usr/bin/ 
and /usr/local/usr/lib/ , which is obviously not right.

-- 
   For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, 
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Matt G|There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see
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