I’m a bit late to this conversation, but I second @drexvictor and @whiscard - creating the .OpenMRS folder in /usr/share/tomcat7 is a better solution.
It takes care of a lot of warnings in the log files where openmrs looks for files in the /usr/share/tomcat7 directory, does not find them and then falls back to /var/lib.
I recently faced this. Have updated the install guide to reflect this.
https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/docs/Step+3+-+Install+Tomcat