Different system administrators and users have different philosophies regarding how to install and maintain software packages on Unix systems. Some will invariably disagree with elements of this strategy, but it has worked well in the past so I will present it here.

In general, when installing MB-System™ it is good to create a parent directory. This might be located in /usr/local or /usr/local/packages/ or in your $HOME/packages if you haven't the requisite permissions to do otherwise. Typically this parent directory is simply called mbsystem.

Then download the MB-System™ package and move it to this parent directory. Uncompress and un-tar this package with something like

tar -xvpzf MB-System.5.0.beta31.tar.gz

The resulting extracted files will be in a subdirectory called mbsystem. Then make a new directory in the parent directory that will uniquely identify this release of MB-System™, perhaps mbsystem5b31.

Finally, move the contents of the extracted package to the new sub-directory and remove the old generic "mbsystem sub-directory

mv mbsystem/* mbsystem5b31/
rmdir mbsystem

Now the directory structure will look something like the following:

/usr/local/packages/mbsystem/
/usr/local/packages/mbsystem/mbsystem5b31/

Then subsequent installations of new releases can be placed in similar, uniquely named subdirectories within /usr/local/packages/mbsystem/, e.g. mbsystem5b32, mbsystem5b33, etc. In this way, administrators can easily maintain several working versions of the software, and users need only change their PATH variable to revert to an older version if required.

One final thing is to put uncompress the Levitus temperature and salinity database, name it something appropriate, and copy it to an appropriate place. A common place to put it is in /usr/local/packages/mbsystem5b31/share/ or if you'd prefer something more generic, perhaps /usr/local/data/. Either way, note where you've put it, as you'll need the path later on.