documentation of libraries

["Rohan Nicholls" <Rohan.Nicholls@informaat.nl>]

Hello there,

I have a happily running debian distribution, but am getting very confused when trying to install certain software as it claims to be lacking all sorts of libraries.

Is there any documentation about what libraries do what, and where things are stored on the file system. For instance I seem to have figured out that important binaries go in /bin, and /sbin (system stuff).

Application binaries in /usr/bin /usr/sbin

locally compiled and installed programs in /usr/local/bin /usr/local/sbin

But then there are the libraries.  If I am running a program from the local section of usr will it know to look in /usr/lib/ for shared libraries or will it only look relative to it (../lib/)?

I am thrilled to be using debian, but am finding that it is difficult to track where things are supposed to go, and where they are kept so I can direct an application if it complains.

Thanks in advance,

Rohan


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