The operation principles and software tools involved for Bitcoin and Litecoin is very similar. This article is the top level overview of what is involved in the installation of Bitcoin and Litecoin in both Windows 7 and Linux 13.10. I also touched on some security issues. The information here can be served as the 'index' for getting your wallet operating securely.
The best and most secure wallets are:
bitcoin-qt for Bitcoin
litecoin-qt for Litecoin
Both of them have got both Windows and Linux installations available for download. Be warned, you must download the installation in their official websites.
For the first time to open the wallet, you may need to wait for several hours for the wallet to sync with the entire transaction history, depends on your internet speed, that could take up to a couple of days.
Under the installation direction, the files are not important, they are just the files necessary to run the wallet client (the bitcoin-qt and litecoin-qt software program). Replacing these files (e.g. newer version is available) will have no effects on your wallet. What is really important your wallet's data, which is stored in a completely different and more obscure directory.
Windows 7
In Woindows 7, the data is under
C:\Users\YourUserName\Appdata\Roaming\Bitcoin
C:\Users\YourUserName\Appdata\Roaming\Litecoin
Please replace the "YourUserName" with your actual user name. The Appdata folder is hidden by default, so you may have to tweak the settings to show all hidden files.
Linux
In Linux, the data is under
home/usr/.bitcoin
home/usr/.litecoin
Please replace the "user" with your actual user name. The .bitcoin and .litecoin folders are hidden by default, so you may have to tweak the settings to show all hidden files.
wallet.dat contains your private keys, your address book, a copy of the transactions that send coins from or to one of your addresses, accounts, reserve keys, personal settings, and a pointer to the current best block. This file is compatible in both Windows and Linux. Please be sure to make backups of this file. It contains the keys necessary for spending your bitcoins. If you lose this file, you lose your wallet forever and no one on earth can recover it.
addr.dat contains IP addresses of peers, both those you've connected to yourself or those you've only heard about. It makes reconnection easier. It has been replaced by peers.dat since 0.7.0
peers.dat contains the same information as addr.dat, but using an efficient custom format.
blkindex.dat contains an index of the blocks and transactions that can be found in all the blk00n.dat files.
debug.log contains the activities of operating the software, the log info is automatically trimmed from time to time.
.lock is a BDB lock file
__db.xxx is used by BDB
The data, index and log files are used by Oracle Berkeley DB, the embedded key/value data store that Bitcoin uses.