Basic Debian installation and configuration

Add handy aliases

Add the following at the end of bash.bashrc:

$ vi /etc/bash.bashrc
...
alias ll='ls -l'
alias pg='ps -ef|grep'
alias vi='vim'

The last alias “vi” is to use vim instead of vi. vim is the more luxury editor ;-).

To install vim, enter the following command:

$ apt-get install vim

Network settings

I want to have a fixed IP address, instead of DHCP. Open the interfaces file and put the following settings in that file. Adapt the address, netmask and gateway to your own network:

$ vi /etc/network/interfaces
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback_

# The primary network interface
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.178.242
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.178.1

Check also if the nameserver IP nr is correct:

$ vi /etc/resolv.conf
nameserver 192.168.178.1

To use the new settings, we need to restart the network interface, enter the following command:

$ /etc/init.d/networking restart

Remove the Debian No Waranty message

When logging in, you get a message of 7 rows about No Waranty of Debian, you can find this text in the file/etc/motd en /etc/motd.tail.

To remove this message, just remove this files. Or you can edit the files with vi and put your own message in it. To remove the files, enter the following commands:

$ rm /etc/motd
$ rm /etc/motd.tail