Debian Linux

See also freebsd and unix tricks.

Some gotchas from installing debian a few times:

• To enable sshd in ubuntu install openssh-server

• Massive ssh headache issues from around 2007–2008; make sure to check on these.

• git is not what you want; you want git-core

• Python transition should be better, but I couldn’t find a way. To get to python 2.5 on etch, do something like:

  Edit /usr/share/python/debian_defaults to this Code:
  
      # the default python version
      default-version = python2.5
      # all supported python versions
      supported-versions = python2.4, python2.5
      # formerly supported python versions
      old-versions = python2.3
      # unsupported versions, including older versions
      unsupported-versions = python2.3
  
  Then sudo pycentral updatedefault python2.4 python2.5
  And change the symlink /usr/bin/python to point to python2.5
  

• Make sure to install things like bzip2, unzip, less, etc

• bash by default takes a very long time to initialize because the auto-completion scripts are loaded multiple times; disable this in ~/.bashrc?

• For building stuff you want build-essential

• For the usual system man pages (“Linux Programmer’s Manual”), you may need to install ‘manpages-dev’

• To install emacs without an X environment, use emacs23-nox (or a more recent version).

Debian Package Tools

dkpg -S somefile shows what packages a given file were installed by. dpkg -L somepackage lists all the files installed by that package.