Debian tips

See the LDP BootPrompt-HOWTO for detailed information on the boot prompt.

All content on one page (useful for printing, presentation mode etc.)

1. Booting the system
   1. "I forgot the root password!" (1)
   2. "I forgot the root password!" (2)
   3. Cannot boot the system
   4. "Let me disable X on boot!"
   5. Other boot tricks with the boot prompt
   6. Setting GRUB boot parameters
2. Recording activities
   1. Recording shell activities
   2. Recording X activities
3. Copy and archive a whole subdirectory
   1. Basic commands for copying a whole subdirectory
   2. cp
   3. tar
   4. pax
   5. cpio
   6. afio
4. Differential backup and data synchronization
   1. Differential backup with rdiff
   2. Daily backup with pdumpfs
   3. Regular differential backup with RCS
5. System freeze recovery
   1. Kill a process
   2. Alt-SysRq
6. Nifty little commands to remember
   1. Pager
   2. Free memory
   3. Set time (BIOS)
   4. Set time (NTP)
      1. Set time with permanent Internet connection
      2. Set time with sporadic Internet connection
   5. How to control console features such as the screensaver
   6. Search administrative database
   7. Disable sound (beep)
   8. Error messages on the console screen
   9. Set console to the correct type
   10. Get the console back to a sane state
   11. Convert a text file from DOS to Unix style
   12. Convert a text file with recode
   13. Regular-expression substitution
   14. Edit a file in place using a script
   15. Extract differences and merge updates for source files
   16. Convert a large file into small files
   17. Extract data from text file table
   18. Script snippets for piping commands
   19. Script snippets for looping over each file
   20. Perl short script madness
   21. Get text or a mailing list archive from a web page
   22. Pretty print a web page
   23. Pretty print a manual page
   24. Merge two PostScript or PDF files
   25. Time a command
   26. nice command
   27. Schedule activity (cron, at)
   28. Console switching with screen
       1. Remote access scenario
       2. Typical screen commands
       3. Backspace and/or Ctrl-H in screen session
       4. Equivalent program to screen for X
   29. Network testing basics
   30. Flush mail from local spool
   31. Remove frozen mail from local spool
   32. Redeliver mbox contents
   33. Clear file contents
   34. Dummy files
   35. chroot
       1. Run a different Debian distribution with chroot
       2. Setting up login for chroot
       3. Setting up X for chroot
       4. Run other distributions with chroot
       5. Build a package with chroot
   36. How to check hard links
   37. mount hard disk image file
   38. Samba
   39. Utilities for foreign filesystems
7. Typical mistakes to be noted
   1. rm -rf .*
   2. rm /etc/passwd

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