On 4/25/06, K. Mike Bradley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
