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Debian Linux
Linux FHS
Setup steps
Log in - often have to take root - #sudo su
Fix /etc/ssh/sshd_conf - remove PermitRootLogin yes
Create keys # ssh-keygen
- for arm cores editor - install diakonos https://github.com/Pistos/diakonos/releases
# git clone https://github.com/Pistos/diakonos
Instructions: https://github.com/Pistos/diakonos
Move .diakonos/
Fix time source - # ed /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf - set
server and fallbacks.
Install wagig
move .bashrc
See Diakonos page
Safe to delete
files in :
/var/cache
/var/tmp cleared at boot - if not running safe to delete
/var/lib/pkgname is fair to delete if package is removed and
purged (should be removed by debpkg)
/run was /var/run now symbolic link - is deleted at boot
FHS details at http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.2.pdf
https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs-3.0.pdf
Distributions
Linux comes packaged by many companies as distributions - that is
combinations of versions of the GNU code with a little glue code
and some install routines that form a complete operating system.
We have tested several distributions and spent some time using
Redhat - but now I can only recommend Debian. The incredible
power of the debian apt-get
system is something you will want to learn about. Be aware
that many Linux systems are intended to provide future lock-in -
This is one of the biggest reason to stick with Debian.
Ubuntu is sort of a broken Debian with malware
pre-installed. Again - I really would recommend avoiding
Ubuntu - they are moving further away from Debian to their snappy
package system. It appears to be good on the surface - no
dependency problems - but dependency problems are exactly the
thing that makes code improve. If you want that sort of
operating system you should just install windoze
Debian Links
- Download
Debian ISO net install
- Work-Needing and
Prospective Packages To request some OSS to be added to
Debian you must first be sure no one else has - if they have add
to the bug report. This is by doing a reportbug for wnpp. RTP
Request to package, ITP Intent to package, RFH Request For Help,
O Orphaned,
- Bug data base
Desktops
The first thing to know is that overall the installation process
is easier than Windows! OK, it is different and you have to learn
how. When you are finished you will have spent about the same
amount of time required for a Windoze installation - but you will
have also installed your applications! You only reboot once!!!!
(How many man-lives of time have been wasted waiting for
M$windows to reboot? Let's see, three times for install and then
another 6 times counting installing a bit of software and all the
updates that they don't see fit to sending out as a new disk.)
Debian install support is available, from your local Linux users
group. It takes just as long to install Debian as Windows, but
when you are finished you have also installed 95% of the software
you will likely use (Ok, I usually install 150% of the software I
will ever use - but some day I really will try that math package
out)
The task bar supports applets that run on it - like the
ones on the far right side of a windows task bar - sort of. My
favorite is kweather. It goes out and gets the local weather from
a nearby airport and displays the temperature and a little sun
that sometimes has a bit of cloud over it. If you click on it you
can read the latest detailed weather report. There are others that
are just for fun, and a sticky-yellow-notes-simulator and of
course a clock - well actually you have lots of choices when it
comes to clocks. I lost track how many there are -but I like the
stock one that has the just the date and time.
KDE has the better file browser for the time being. You can run
Gnome apps from KDE - Gnome is working hard to get better.
Competition is a great stimulus, the lack of which has caused the
stagnation of the Windows world.
Apparmor
This costs more time than it saves - to often apparmor
Browsers
Google Earth
- WW2D download
site - you can snag topographical maps of anywhere in the
USA - plus much more - Really hope WW2D becomes part of Debian.
Email MUA
Calender
Word processing
- Bi Lingual computer setups
- libreoffice (then supported fork of openoffice) also will
edit text, and open M$word documents, Excell documents, has an
HTML editor, paint database capabilities and glue functions. It
has one more feature that is a killer; it will run on both
windows and Linux - thus libreOffice is the perfect migration
office suite for those who want out of the Redmond strangle
hold!
- kate is a great text editor
Simple text
editing
- Kate works for me
- diakonos simple
terminal editor if you don't like emacs or vim complexity
Accounting
- linux
accounting This page lists several accounting packages and
our notes about them. A continuing search for a GPL software
package to replace QB(QuickBooks).
Nevernote or
Onenote Replacement
- nixnote2 Sadly, this was written in Java - that non-securable
language ( it doesn't wipe memory if you remove an object ) with
a culture of binary blobs without source, so there is a problem
packaging it.
HTML editors
- Seamonkey
Has Spell check. - you can set it up so it won't bloat page
(preserve original source, use Elements )
- CSS Cascaded Style Sheets
- libreoffice- creates extreme bloat code that isn't human
friendly - as bad as frontpage. Don't use it for HTML!
Spreadsheet
- gnumeric -
excellent - so good there is no reason to even talk about
anything else.
Graphics
programs
- gimp somewhat like photoshop
- digikam Photo indexer, tagger for adding, editing and
searching of IPTC/IIM, EXIF data and JPEG comments. Meta data
editor - picture tagger - can put tags, title, caption within
image-fil and much more
- Great package to make web galleries of pictures - lazygal
- gwenview Photo
viewer and re-namer
- hugin Panoramic stitcher
- luminance HDR workflow Luminance website
- kipi-plugins Image plugins for KIPI aware programs Website
- inkscape a vector
graphics program
- ufraw Raw conversion - converts Adobe DNG (Digital Negative
Specification (Adobe's raw camera file)) to other popular image
formats.
Graphics command
line packages
-
- imagemagick (Abbreviated IM )Supper set of conversion and
modification commands - also see Fred's
Scripts] which further extend IM.
- autotrace - convert bitmap to vector
- exiftran - jpg manipulation - lossless jpg rotations via
exifautotran *
- libimage-exiftool-perl
for editing exif data
- exiv2 for editing
exif data
- Photo tagging exif IPTC XMP
- Photo compacting/optimizing software
-
- Optipng
Lossless optimizing of PNGs
- jpegoptim
Lossless and quality optimizing of jpegs jpgs
Plotting -
Graphing
- LabPlot
- KChart
- gnuplot Plotting
system - change data into nice graphs.
Calculator
PDF Viewers and
Editors
- okular probably the best viewer
-
- gscan2pdf convert scans to PDF and more
- pdfedit Yes, it is possible (not easy ) to edit pdf files.
- calibre convert PDF to ebook formats
PDF command Line
Tools
- pdftk PDF tool kit -
you can split pdf's delete pages - reorder pages and more.
Command line tool.
-
- This is the tool to unpack PDF packages (PDF packages are
another attempt to make a proprietary standard locking - malware
IMO )
- xpdf-tools is really good too
Signature rotator
ksig is my choice after trying
several - most are overly complex - unspported 2012 needs a fix..
Webcast radio
tunner
Streamtunner is great
Video Editing
kdenlive
transcode - remove
shakes from video and convert from most anything to most anything
Electronics EE
Electrical Engineering
kicad is an excellent
schematic capture to printer circuit board CAD system - should get a
best of Linux EE software award.
eeschema kicad's
schematic editor
cvpcb - the component to module (AKA foot-print) editor
Pcbnew
gerbview Gerber file
viewer - and production notes
Bitmap2Component
Converts bitmap images to filled polygons
wings3d - 3d view - good
way to waste a lot of time..
Qucs Quite Universal
Circuit Simulator) is an integrated circuit
simulator.
EE CAD
Terminology
CAD CAM
FreeCAD
PIM Personal
Information Manager
- jpilot palm desktop
for Linux!
File compare and
meld
- meld - If you have customized code and need to update, there
isn't anything better I've yet seen. You can look at two files
side by side - clearly see the differences and copy parts by
clicking the arrow.
- There is also kompare, tkdiff
Multi-file find
and replace
- regexxer
Powerful regular expression GUI tool that lets you change
strings in multiple files all at once! Similar to multiedit
multi-edit.
Windows
Emulation
If you have a couple of windows only programs you need to use,
you may well be able to run them on linux
- wine - kindle, some versions of quickbooks.. etc..
Telephony VoIP-
Video chat
Printer Setup
For Brother network printing - the connection link looks like
ipp://hostname/ipp/print
Postscript printers are still probably the best choice for
Linux/Debian. Unfortunately, the default PPD files lack paper sizes
such as IndexCards.. BUT you can modify these files as
outlined on the Edit PPD Files.
Sound, MIDI and
Sheet-music generating packages
- Debian
Sound How to get sound working on Debian
- phonon KDE sound daemon
- jackd Inter plugging sound daemon
- rosegarden
Rosegarden lets you import/export MIDI, you can even play a
keyboard to input music - advanced features - impressive.
- musescore
Music score editing system
- noteedit Lets
you edit scores and imports/exports MIDI files as well as common
sheet-music formats such as lilypond to produce printed content.
- hydrogen - drum machine Simple drum machine/step sequencer
Scanning and OCR
Bluetooth Links
Sys Admin Tasks
sysadmin
Hardware
Mother boards
Asus TUF Z270 Mark 1 MB
Keyboard Stuff
- Bi Lingual computer setups
- Identify keyboard size
- pc101 means a 'standard pc' keyboard with 101 keys.
Such a keyboard has no less/greater key (and no MS Window
keys too).
- pc102 ('base' keyboard with '<>' key)
- pc105 (the same but with LeftWin/RightWin/Menu keys).
Caps Lock
button
I never use the Caps Lock button. Never. The only time I "use"
it is when I accidentally press it and start typing things in
UPPERCASE. To disable it in Linux all you have to do is enter
this on the command line:
$ xmodmap -e "remove lock = Caps_Lock"
To set this permanently, just stick the above line in your
~/.bashrc file (or /etc/bash.bashrc if you're root) so that it
looks something like this:
if [ "$PS1" ]; then
# Disables the bloody CapsLock button
xmodmap -e "remove lock = Caps_Lock"
...
fi
Compatability
Install and learn the following commands:
-
Hardware to
avoid
- Brother
- Novel
- Olympus audio recorders ( proprietary audio files format )
- Sonly audio recorders
Identifying
Hardware
- lscpu
- lshw - extracts the information from different /proc files
- hwinfo a bit more than lshw can report
- lspci
- lsusb
- lsscsi (obsolete - or what package provides? )
- inxi (provided by the inxi package)
- lsblk - List block devices
- df - disk space of file systems
- mount - list mounts
- free - list free RAM
- dmidecode - different get info from SMBOIS data structures
(DMI tables).
- lsof - lists openfiles - you probably want to grep this
output
- lots more in proc - example use $cat /proc/mdstat to see
state of your raids
Command
line cheats
Disk usage
Ok, You know your have been there. you go to back up your stuff
and find out it is 16G too big. So how do you find the big file
that you meant to delete?
- gmap is a gui program that makes finding large clinkers
easy.
- KDE has filelight
- For working from the shell try ncdu
- Disk full, directory size
- $ df -h ;shows mount free and size
- $ du ; shows use of current directory
Networking
Network
Monitoring
Package
Handling
This is something not found in windows - Think of it as an
application store - but everything is free. If you need some
software you just launch this application and it finds it,
installs it (free of course) with just a click or two.
- For the Desktop use Synaptic - great for searching through
the 28,000 packages available.
- Sometimes wajig is better. wajig.
- Cleaning Package Cruft
- find best mirror server
$ netselect-apt -o test -c US -a amd64
- To restore a missing or modified conf file - install using
dpkg -i --force-confask pkgname
- crontab cheat
sheet
APT key magic
Sometimes you will get an error about a key
gpg --recv-key --keyserver pgp.mit.edu <key number>
gpg --export A70DAF536070D3A1 | apt-key add -
- nfs - reread exports file:
- $ exportfs -r
echo "- - -" > /sys/class/scsi_host/host0/scan
Run GUI admin programs - all work - First is simple
gksu guiprogam
kdesudo
gksudo
Apt Tricks
- apt-rdepends - find what dependency installed some program
- apt-cache rdepends
- Get a list of all the config settings for apt
$apt-config dump
Server Daemons
and system programs
- IMAP - Internet
Message Access Protocol
- logcheck look
for funny business in your logs automatically and have them
emailed to you.
- shorewall
firewall config
- Raid How to get move to
a RAID system working with Debian
- Mysql on Debian - How
to edit MySQL tables as a spread sheet and other notes.
- bind DNS server
- postgresql
Notes
- nut UPS monitoring
software - server-client
- apache Cheat sheet
- cruft Find cruft on older systems.
- openvpn kde
- samba create folders for
windoze machines
MTAs
For VERY simple systems that only send mail via your local
server - use nullmailer - nullmailer is your friend..
- nullmailer (has que) or< ssmtp (queless - you can lose
messages - also no upstream support anymore)
Other wise use the standard exim
- Exim Tidbits for
supporting Exim the best choice for an MTA
- clamav
Identifying
ports
When rkhunter tells you that there are hidden processes, try to
cd to the /proc/<pid> directory for the process (where
<pid> is one of the process ID numbers output by
rkhunter). If you can't cd into the directory, then the process
isn't really hidden, it was just in the middle of exiting when
the rkhunter check ran and rkhunter was confused and you
probably have nothing to worry about.
If you do manage to cd into the /proc/<pid> directory,
then it's likely you have a problem.
Interesting things to do once you're in the /proc/<pid>
directory include:
- cat cmdline should give you the name the process is running
under
- cat environ | perl -pe 's/\000/\n/g' gets you the
environment variable settings for the process
- sudo ls -l fd shows you what files the process currently
has open
- sudo ls -l cwd shows you the current working directory of
the process (which could be interesting if the process was
started by the attacker from their rootkit installation
directory)
There's plenty of other cool stuff you can do with the various
bits of information under /proc, but the above should be enough
to help you figure out what the process(es) are doing and how
much trouble you're in.
Udev
You can also identify hardware with udev - and set up rules for it
- udev Rules Tricks and more
System test
and Burn-in tools
Boot - MBR
vs UEFI
Application
development
Building
custom packages
wajig source foo
cd foo-1.0 patch -p0 < ...
debchange -i or debchante oldversion -v newversion
fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -b -uc -us
Putting
Debian on ...
The so-called Ubuntu phone is not really opensource like
Debian - boots a android kernel with nasty closed source
binary blobs - your device/data belongs to others.
new stuff
not yet sorted
Add your about favorite Linux program I missed or email me
at lrak@lrak.net
- be sure to tell me WHY you like it better than the others.
-
Finding local config
files - used to be easy.
OSS not
part of Debian
ph +1(785) 841-3089
Email