Debian Linux Administration

Debian Linux is a very stable, easily upgraded, free version of Linux. It is worth checking out.

This section discusses some common Debian tasks.

If the system is set up to use dhcp, then the /etc/network/interfaces would contain:

iface eth0 inet dhcp

To change the system to use a static IP address, change the /etc/network/interfaces file to:

iface eth0 inet static
    address 192.168.12.2
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 192.168.12.254

apt-cache search xserver
dpkg -r xserver-s3v
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

The rest of this section lists various commands you might want to use with packages.

To find out which packages are available to install on a topic, such as xserver:

apt-cache search xserver

apt-get install xserver-xfree86

apt-cache show package name

apt-cache showpkg package-name

dpkg --list

dpkg --status packagename

dpkg --search filename

dpkg -l | more
dpkg --get-selections > ~/currrent-pkgs.txt

dpkg -r xserver-s3v

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86S

deb http://debian.crosslink.net/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib
deb-src http://debian.crosslink.net/debian/ unstable main non-free contrib

# apt-get update
Get:1 http://debian.crosslink.net unstable/main Packages [1931kB]
Get:2 http://debian.crosslink.net unstable/main Release [82B]
....

apt-get -u dist-upgrade

To clean out the cache:

apt-get clean