I am a fairly new Ubuntu user (and Linux user, for that matter) and I just downloaded a program whose installer was a .sh file. Not thinking, I copied the installer to an /opt subdirectory, thinking that I was going to install the application there:

sudo cp ~/Downloads/fooInstaller.sh /opt/someDir

I can't remember, but I either had to use sudo because /opt required it, or I just used it without thinking, but in any case, I prefixed with sudo.

Once in /opt/someDir, I executed the installer again, using sudo:

sudo sh fooInstaller.sh

The terminal went crazy, and a few seconds later, a graphical install wizard popped up that guided me through the rest of the process. At the end of the wizard I was prompted to launch the program, and I did, and everything was great. Until...

I closed the program, and attempted to add it to my Ubuntu "panel" (the icon panel at the top of the screen). The program was installed to /usr/local/foo/theProgram, and so I specified that URL as the command in the custom app launcher.

When I open the program through the panel/launcher (at the top of the screen), the program doesn't load or operate correctly. I get a lot of error messages complaining about being denied permissions.

I'm assuming that this is a "superuser/installation/privs" issue, and not a problem with the application (hence this post at superuser.com instead of the application's forums), because when I launch the program from the terminal with sudo, it opens and executes perfectly fine, just like it did the first time around after the install wizard finished.

I realize I'm probably going to have to uninstall the program completely, and re-install it differently.

Finally, my question: After uninstalling, can I avoid all these issue by just running the installer (sh fooInstaller.sh) right out of my Downloads directory, sans the sudo prefix? If not, how do I get the program to install without root privs so that I can add it to my panel/launcher and get it executing correctly?

Sorry for the long post but I didn't want to omit any details because, as I'm sure you can tell, I'm not really sure I know what I'm doing.

Thanks for any help here!