Now that's a good question.

On the N900*, you don't generally use installers, but use what's called a "package manager". A package manager's mission is, by definition, to allow installation of new software (and removal) requiring the least amount of effort from the user.

Why? Because traditionally, the amount of extra applications a user installed on a pristine GNU/Linux environment is so large that having to answer a single question for each of them quickly becomes unmanageable, as the first distributors and LFS users quickly discovered. So they devised a way to install new software with the user just selecting the new 37,000 packages of software he wanted to install and not having to answer any other single question (or just the most important ones).

Long time ago someone decided not only to make Maemo a Debian-forked distro but also to make the preferred third party software distribution method Debian packages (whoever made this decision could as well have decided that they want a "installer" based method!!).
I'm sure one of the reasons for going with a package manager is that they did agree with the mission of a package manager: that is, to make it easy to install software -- no questions asked.

Now, I personally agree with this decision, because nearly every time a installer asks me a question I leave the default setting as is and move on. This does include the "path for private sources/binaries" question.

Note the use of the "nearly" keyword in the above paragraph. This is because on the Nokia Internet Tablets, the root file system has been generally smallish. Since the root file system is the place where the "path for private sources/binaries" defauls to, one could easily find himself filling such a small space.

Such a user would need to devise alternative ways of installing software, or configuring the package manager appropiately, or even use the poor man's solution (but still quite effective!!) of symlink /usr/share/<appname> to /some/place/I/want/. (Note: explaining symlinks is outside the scope of this post).

What happened then? Well, as the "path for private stuff" question rose in importance, it started to make _less_ sense for package managers to NOT ask it. And -- behold! They started ASKING for it!

Get a N810 and try to install OpenTTD. It will ask you wheter to install to the internal card or to the external SD card.


On the N900, "the makers" realized in what I can only call one quite embarrasing moment that its rootfs was plainly too small for normal usage. So they devised a plan, not unlike what N8x0 packagers used to do with large packages, where certain packages would install into the internal card (aka /opt) instead of the smallish rootfs. This process is what is called "optification".

With such a setup, again it stopped making sense for package managers to ask where to install software, because the default place was again good enough for a majority of users. So, the OpenTTD package for the N900 doesn't ask you where to install it.


To sum it up,
- Where are the installers?
Guidelines for the N900 suggest not to use them but use packages for ease of use.
- Why does my package manager not ask for a path when installing a package?
Because a majority of people thinks such a question is useless, as the default is OK for them.
- Does this mean I'm forced to install to the default location?
No; see this very thread or the discussions we used to have about optification a year ago for information.


*Note that the N900 specially has quite a lot of extraneous limitations. Namely, "installing apps to an SD card" would be quite impossible usually because no one asked N900 developers to ensure our applications would be installable into a Windows filesystem a.k.a. FAT (and not a real filesystem with support for POSIX elements and attributtes).