RE: [gentoo-user] Newbie question re: /usr

["K. Mike Bradley" <kmb@mikienet.com>]

Thank you Richard.
That answers my question very well.




-----Original Message-----
From: richard.j.fish@gmail.com [mailto:richard.j.fish@gmail.com] On Behalf
Of Richard Fish
Sent: Tuesday, April 25, 2006 12:14 PM
To: gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Newbie question re: /usr

On 4/25/06, K. Mike Bradley <kmb@mikienet.com> wrote:
> I wonder if anyone can explain why /usr was created?

The idea is that / can be a very small partition and contains
everything necessary to boot and administer the system, and /usr can
be a separate partition or logical volume.  Some advantages to this
setup are:

1. If the partition containing /usr is corrupted, the system will
still boot, and you have enough tools (fdisk, mkfs, tar, cpio, etc) to
repair and restore it.

2. /usr can be on a network server.

3. On the network server, exporting /usr presents no risk to /.  Even
if /usr is filled up, the server will continue to function and can
still be administered.

This is why:

- command interpreters like bash, ash, etc go in /bin
- network clients and remote shells (ssh, telnet, etc) go in /usr/bin
- network, filesystem, and disk utilities go in /bin
- large text editors (emacs, etc) go in /usr/bin
- small text editors (vi, vim) go in /bin
- X, KDE, Gnome, et al are in /usr
- and so on...

That said, you wll find a lot of desktop systems (mine included) that
have / and /usr on the same filesystem.  It's a matter of taste and
what you will be using the system for whether you should make /usr a
separate filesystem or not.

-Richard

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