The aim of this page is to alert you to some of the benefits of Debian Linux, and to encourage you to use some of the more advanced features that will save you time with minimal effort.
You regularly install Linux onto new PCs or servers. You hate having to find the CD every time. Some of your PCs/servers don't even have CD-ROM drives. The solution: network install.
To make a Linux server act as a network install server, do the following:
Debian uses apt to manage packages. This system is so powerful it has been copied by other Linux distributors, even RedHat has copied it. Therefore, learn to use apt and you will be able to manage many types of Linux system.
Try each of these commands:
apt-cache search wget
apt-cache show wget
apt-get install wget
apt-cache search dvd | less
man dpkg
man apt-get
man apt-cache
Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and include the following line:
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sid main
Doing so gives you access to some handy packages that can't be included in the official sites, such as libdvdcss2 and many video codecs
Popular packages include:
xine libdvdcss2 mpg123 alsamixer-gui mozilla firefox thunderbird openoffice gnumeric amule avifile-divx-plugin avifile-xvid-plugin dvb-utils dvdrip xzgv gimp xpdf mplayer netpbm sox xvncclient w32codecs whois gdm gnome-core xserver-xfree86 xmms xprint xsane
bind9 tftpd-hpa dhcp3-server squirrelmail courier-imap postfix mysql-server slapd nagios-text php4 spamassassin procmail samba vlan webalizer mrtg rrdtool
netcat tcpdump iproute ngrep openswan snmp snmpd cupsys bzip2 zip make-kpkg apache apcupsd cdparanoia cdrecord dnsutils hotplug ldap-utils mutt unzip lrzsz minicom lynx wget mgetty mysql-client ntpdate ntp-simple ssh wireless-tools cvs svn grub
If your Linux machine may not always have a monitor attached (e.g. it is a 1U server in a data center), then enable serial port access. The machine then behaves like a Cisco router - you can plug your laptop into the serial port and control it without a monitor or network connection.
Put these in /boot/grub/menu.lst:
serial --unit=0 --speed=9600
terminal serial
In /boot/grub/menu.lst, find a line starting with `# kopt=root=...' and add `console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0', like so:
# kopt=root=/dev/hda3 ro console=ttyS0,9600 console=tty0
In /etc/inittab, uncomment the line for a getty on `ttyS0'.
Reboot your server while having another machine connected to the serial port. You should be able to control the grub menu and see the kernel startup messages on the serial port.
The following sequence of commands will help you install a kernel:
apt-get install linux-source-2.6.14 kernel-package ncurses5-dev bzip2 gcc
cd /usr/src
tar xf linux-source-2.6.14.tar.bz2 --bzip2
cd linux-source-2.6.14
make menuconfig
make-kpkg --revision=custom.1 binary-arch
dpkg -i /usr/src/kernel-image-2.6.14_custom.1_i386.deb