If you run across something that blindly assumes /home is the root of $HOME, then that something should be fixed - you shouldn't have to alter your preferred way of setting up your system in this case.

Wow, Now I really understand. "UNIX system resources" makes more sense to me. Thanks so much for that page describing the hierarchy standards. That really helps me understand why /home is what it is as well as all the other directories. Also, that description of / being the all way intersection and /home makes getting home faster seems more logical (sorry I can't name specific users; I'm trying to type this on my phone).

I'm just having one more problem with sudo/permissions. Sometimes I'm not allowed to cd into a directory when I mount my external hard drive to it. I have to log in as root. If I try "sudo cd" bash just tells me the command is not found. I have to fully "su". Is there a group I can add my regular user to so I can cd to any directory (though not necessarily write to it), including external media? "sudo cd" seems really strange.

Yeah, I noticed how `sudo cd /blah` doesn't work on an *buntu box. Well, you could change things perhaps with group permissions, but to me it seems something else is amiss. If you mount the drive as user, and you have (or should have) permissions over the directories then ... ehm?

Can you post the line in fstab that gives you permission to mount that device on that mountpoint? And the permissions on the directory that is giving you troubles? `ls -l /path/to/dir`

Oh I see. I wasn't using fstab at all and I mounted the device manually from /dev/sdc1 to /mnt/tmp using sudo. I just thought that normal users would be able to read even when mounted by root. I'm so used to automounting utilities. I guess I could just get used to su'ing to root and accessing the files that way.

I just wanted to mention I noticed how awesome the slackware community is! You guys are as knowledgeable, if not more, than the Arch community! I really think I'm going to like slackware

No, if all users could access devices mounted by root, not a lot would be left of the security system. There's more options on that matter than I could describe here, but editing fstab is a very good place to start.

Be sure to read the fstab man page, but in short this is the syntax:
And now any regular user who's member of the plugdev group can mount that particular device under that particular mountpoint. You can fine tune this more, but this'll get you started. If not for anything else, it would keep you from having to be root to access a drive that you need as user.

In fact, all your automounters respect /etc/fstab, so learning to edit that gives you more flexibility on the automounting frontier as well. If there's a 'special' device you always want mounted under a certain directory, it is possible as well. It makes scripting easier for one thing.

And you'll have more fun than you really wanted ;-)