Downloading programs

[Njasmine]

Ok, my question is how to install a program (ex. Kexi) on my external hard drive. there's a lot of programs I would love to have but, I don't want them to hog up space on my internal hard drive.

Dell Mini 10
Linux Mint 7

[hazel]

When you install binaries from your distro's repositories, they go automatically into the usual system directories (e.g. /bin for the executable, /usr/share for data, /etc for configuration files). As far as I know, you have no control over this. However, if you build programs from source, you can usually determine where the resultant files will go.

Most builds involve three commands:

 ./configure
make
sudo make install

At the configure stage you can add configuration variables. In particular there is a variable called PREFIX which determines which directory will be the root of the tree containing the installed files. By default, PREFIX=/usr/local. Thus the executable will go into /usr/local/bin, the shared data into /usr/local/share...

Suppose you have an external drive mounted on /mnt/ext. Then you can do the configure step with

./configure PREFIX=/mnt/ext