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Copyright 2007, 2008 Osamu Aoki GPL, (Please agree to GPL, GPL2, and any version of GPL which is compatible with DSFG if you update any part of wiki page)

Generated HTML is at "[http://people.debian.org/~osamu/pub/getwiki/html/ch01.en.html Debian Reference: Chapter 1. Preface]".

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Preface

This [http://people.debian.org/~osamu/pub/getwiki/html/index.en.html Debian Reference (version 2)] (@@@build-date@@@) is intended to provide a broad overview of Debian system administration as a post-installation user guide.

The target reader is someone who is willing to learn shell scripts but who is not ready to read all the C sources to figure out how the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU GNU]/[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux Linux] system works.

Disclaimer

All warranties are disclaimed. All trademarks are property of their respective trademark owners.

The Debian system itself is a moving target. This makes its documentation difficult to be current and correct. Although the current unstable version of Debian system was used as the basis for writing this, some contents may be already outdated by the time you read this.

Please treat this document as the secondary reference. This document does not replace any authoritative guides. The author and contributors do not take responsibility for consequences of errors, omissions or ambiguity in this document.

What is Debian

The [http://www.debian.org Debian Project] is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system. It's distribution is characterized by:

Free Software pieces in Debian come from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU GNU], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux Linux], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution BSD], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System X], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Systems_Consortium ISC], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Software_Foundation Apache], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostscript Ghostscript], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Unix_Printing_System Common Unix Printing System ], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_(software) Samba], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME GNOME], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KDE KDE], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla Mozilla], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor) Vim], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX TeX], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX LaTeX], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook DocBook], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl Perl], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language) Python], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl Tcl], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language) Java], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_(programming_language) Ruby], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP PHP], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_DB Berkeley DB], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySQL MySQL], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostgreSQL PostgreSQL], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exim Exim], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postfix_(software) Postfix], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutt_(e-mail_client) Mutt], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD FreeBSD], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD OpenBSD], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs Plan 9] and many more independent free software projects. Debian integrates this diversity of Free Software into one system.

About this document

Guiding rules

Following guiding rules were followed while compiling this document:

I tried to elucidate hierarchical aspects and lower levels of the system.

Prerequisites

You are required to seek help from (in approximate order of importance, starting with the most important sources):

(!) For detailed documentation, you may need to install the corresponding documentation package named with "-doc" as its suffix.

Conventions

This document provides information through the following simplified presentation style with bash(1) shell command examples and bullets:

# <command in root account>
$ <command in user account>

These shell prompts distinguish account used and correspond to set environment variables as: "PS1='\$'" and "PS2=' '". These values are chosen for the sake of readability of this document and are not typical on actual installed system.

(!) See the meaning of the "$PS1" and "$PS2" environment variables in bash(1).

A command snippet in a text paragraph is referred by the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "aptitude safe-upgrade".

A text data in a configuration file is referred by the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "deb-src".

A command is referred by its name in the typewriter font optionally followed by its manpage section number in parenthesis, such as bash(1). You are encouraged to obtain information by typing:

$ man 1 bash

A manpage is referred by its name in the typewriter font followed by its manpage section number in parenthesis, such as sources.list(5). You are encouraged to obtain information by typing:

$ man 5 sources.list 

An info page is referred by its command snippet in the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "info make". You are encouraged to obtain information by typing:

$ info make 

A filename is referred by the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "/etc/passwd". For configuration files, you are encouraged to obtain information by typing:

$ sensible-pager "/etc/passwd"

A directory name is referred by the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "/etc/init.d/". You are encouraged to explore its contents by typing:

$ mc "/etc/init.d/"

A package name is referred by its name in the typewriter font, such as vim. You are encouraged to obtain information by typing:

$ dpkg -L vim

or

$ apt-cache show vim

or

$ aptitude show vim

A documentation may indicate its location by the filename in the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "/usr/share/doc/sysv-rc/README.runlevels.gz" and "/usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.html"; or by its [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator URL], such as [http://www.debian.org]. You are encouraged to read the documentation by typing:

$ zcat "/usr/share/doc/sysv-rc/README.runlevels.gz" | sensible-pager 
$ sensible-browser "/usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.html"
$ sensible-browse "http://www.debian.org"

An environment variable is referred by its name with leading "$" in the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "$TERM". You are encouraged to obtain its current value by typing:

$ echo "$TERM"

The popcon

The [http://popcon.debian.org/ popcon] data was presented as the objective measure for the popularity of each package. It was downloaded on @@@pop-date@@@ and contains the total submission of @@@pop-submissions@@@ reports over @@@pop-packages@@@ binary packages and @@@pop-architectures@@@ architectures.

(!) Please note that the @@@arch@@@ unstable archive contains only @@@all-packages@@@ packages currently. The popcon data contains reports from many old system installations.

The popcon number preceded with "V:" for "votes" is calculated by "100 * (the popcon submissions for the package executed recently on the PC)/(the total popcon submissions)".

The popcon number preceded with "I:" for "installs" is calculated by "100 * (the popcon submissions for the package installed on the PC)/(the total popcon submissions)".

(!) The popcon figures should not be considered as absolute measures of the importance of packages. There are many factors which can skew statistics. For example, some system participating popcon may have mounted directories such as "/bin" with "noatime" option for system performance improvement and effectively disabled "vote" from such system.

The package size

The package size data was also presented as the objective measure for each package. It is based on the "Installed-Size:" reported by "apt show" or "aptitude show" command (currently on @@@arch@@@ architecture for the unstable release). The reported size is in KiB ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte Kibibyte] = unit for 1024 bytes).

(!) A package with a small numerical package size may indicate that the package in the unstable release has a dummy package which installs other packages with significant contents by the dependency. The dummy package enables a smooth transition or split of the package.

Bug reports

Please file bug reports on the debian-reference package using reportbug(1) if you find any issues. For simple spell errors and grammar corrections, you may alternatively edit the source text available as Debian Reference wiki page at [http://wiki.debian.org/DebianReference] and tell me to update the document.

Some quotes for new users

Here are some interesting quotes from the Debian mailing list which may help enlighten new users: