Matthew Miller <mattdm <at> fedoraproject.org> writes:
On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 09:50:10AM -0700, Howard Howell wrote:
It's important to realize that you *can* have a separate /usr -- it just really needs to be available at boot time. That means you can have separate mount options, filesystems, partition constraints, or whatever. It just doesn't work anymore to have it on a network share or (if anyone ever did this!) removable media added after initial boot.
But in the modern business environment, users log in from multiple places. How does that work if the user directory is local?
On modern Linux/Unix, the "/usr" directory holds system binaries and libraries -- it is not the user directory. On Fedora (and most Linux systems), that is "/home". And there's no problem sharing that over the network.
The funny thing is that back in the earliest days of Unix, /usr is where user directories lived. When K&R ran out of room in / for programs, they looked to for a partition that had additional space available and it was /usr. Originally programs ended up in /usr/bin simply because there wasn't room for them in /bin; not for some usage reason.
Cheers, Dave