where to put files?

Linux client has been running great, and this may be more of a generic linux question - but where would convention suggest I put these files? They're sitting in my home directory right now...

I figured /usr/local/bin would make sense, right? But I wasn't sure putting the folder there made sense -- so I moved all the files to /usr/local/src/SecondLife ... then created a softlink

/usr/local/bin/secondlife -> ../src/SecondLife/secondlife

so I can certainly call secondlife this way, it's on my path, but I get the error:

/usr/local/bin/secondlife: line 4: bin/secondlife-bin: No such file or directory

So... I know I can call it with a complete path from wherever I put it (sans soft link)... but obviously I'm missing some basic understanding of .... something....

it's a noob question, but your help would be appreciated..

"secondlife" is actually just a very short script that calls the main secondlife executable. As you can see from viewing it, it is designed to be called when the current directory is the main SecondLife directory.

I wouldn't advise hacking it up though because the current client is also designed to *write* to its own directories, and since you are running it as a normal user it is best to leave it in your user directory.

/usr/local/src is for machine-specific source files and so if you really insist on doing it this way, install everything to /usr/local/games/secondlife and edit the script to either cd here or make an absolute reference to the executable. You'd also need to give yourself write permissions here.

Did I miss anything? I don't want to test this myself because it's rather pointless.

ok, thanks
My point was : just trying to keep my directory structure clean. I assumed there was convention for where to put something like this. I'm also running the Last.FM player out of my user directory - so it seemed that it could get messy soon.

There are conventions, but the conventions say the programs should write user data to a subdirectory of the user's home, not a subdirectory of where the program is ran from; so it's not technically wrong to keep SL in your home dir.
What I did was I create a dir "apps" in my home, and I keep anythying I run from my home directory there. opt would probably be a better name, but who cares? =P Under the user's home, neither is standard

I have put the secondlife folder in /opt and created the link /opt/SecondLife -> /opt/SecondLife_1_8_4_7 so I can update the client without having to mess my my desktop shortcut.

I am on Gentoo and this where most other packages of this type get installed.