debian

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/320).

In some situation (when using previously devfs, for example), your /dev is empty of static files, and moving to udev or coming back to static /dev is then impossible. In package debootstrap on Debian, there is the file /usr/lib/debootstrap/devices.tar.gz (or /usr/share/debootstrap/devices.tar.gz in newer releases) which only contains standard /dev files. To set them in place is then just:

# cd /mount_point
# tar zxvf /usr/lib/debootstrap/

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/314).

From time to time, you would like to have a more recent version of an application than what is currently packaged in Debian  [1]. This is basically the same process as backporting anyway. There has been the introduction in Debian of a new set of tools called Debian External Health Status (dehs) which proved really useful for QA.

This article was first written in December 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/313).

To do the best use of Debian's superior package management system (APT), the application must be packaged, in the form of one or several .deb files. Packaging has many, many advantages, you just couldn't believe. As Debian is all about Free Software, it is clear that the preferred source for a package be the upstream source package. That way, submitting patches upstream is as simple as possible as they are naturally available to the World.

This article was first written in November 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/304).

If you notice warning messages like these when doing an APT update, read this to fix it:

W: GPG error: ftp://ftp.tux.org unstable Release: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY BB5E459A529B8BDA

To fix it, take the last 8 characters of the PUBKEY here above and issue the following commands:

testmachine$ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 529B8BDA
gpg: requesting key 529B

This article was first written in November 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/299).

The following has been tested on Debian Sarge, but may work with later versions. Follow this procedure if you refused to split the Exim4 configuration as debconf proposes. If you did split it, it would be slightly different.

This article was first written in October 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/296).

Introduction

This article helps installing Eclipse 3.1 and the PHPEclipse plugin on a Debian Sarge install.

This article was first written in September 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/290).

To change the MTU of an interface on GNU/Linux, you just need to tell ifconfig to do so, like this for example:

/sbin/ifconfig eth0 mtu 1492

To change it permanently on Debian, put it in the /etc/network/interfaces, where almost all network parameters are found. To do this, just add a line mtu to the definition of your interface.

This article was first written in August 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/289).

Due to the unrivaled apt tools, Debian is probably the easiest GNU/Linux distribution to keep up-to-date, at least when you have a fast Internet connection. In a network of many machines, the goal is slightly different though: you probably want to take as little bandwidth as possible away from users.

cron-apt

The first part of the solution, and the easiest to setup, is to install package cron-apt which will download the packages

This article was first written in August 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/286).

In a networked infrastructure, with many workstations needing to print (or generate PDF or PS files, or send faxes), CUPS may help a lot, especially with its automatic network-browsing features. Let's see how to set that up.

CUPS Server

First, you probably want to setup a server to share printers.

This article was first written in March 2005 for the BeezNest technical
website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/218).

This is a short tutorial on how to fully install PostgreSQL (with ready-to-use user accounts and test table) on a simple Debian installation. When not specified otherwise by the command line prefix or by a full statement, you are supposed to have root permissions.

The packages

To install the PostgreSQL base system as well as a textual client, you need to issue the following command

apt-get install postgresql postgresql-client

This will ins