Stuff compiled from source should <i>not</i> be installed to the same prefix as stuff provided by the OS and/or package manager.<p>For programs that use the de-facto standard GNU Autocrap build system you can specify this by passing "--prefix=/usr/local" to the "./configure" script. It's also good to not install everything system-wide, and instead have a $HOME/bins prefix, with $HOME/bins/bin added to PATH. (And $HOME/bins/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and that pkg-config thing if it matters, etc)