Configure System Settings

Installing Gentoo - Configure System Settings

Windows users will be familiar the registry, which stores system settings in a proprietary database spanned across two files named system.dat and user.dat. Both of these files are susceptible to corruption, tampering and security issues, and a Windows system cannot boot without them. Almost every setting in a Linux system is stored in a text-based configuration file stored somewhere within the filesystem. All of these files are accessible from a command prompt and can be modified using a simple text editor such as nano.

1. before setting up the new environment we need to copy over the network settings

cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/gentoo/etc/

1. in order to compile the kernel in the new environment we need to mount the dev and proc systems

mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc mount -o bind /dev /mnt/gentoo/dev

1. now, we enter the new environment.

chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash env-update && source /etc/profile

1. now we set the system time zone. in this example I use the Canada Pacific (Vancouver) setting.

unlink /etc/localtime ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Canada/Pacific /etc/localtime

nano -w /etc/conf.d/clock

1. make the following changes:

CLOCK="local" TIMEZONE="America/Vancouver"

1. as usual, ctrl-x then y to exit nano. now, let's set our networking info.

nano -w /etc/conf.d/hostname

HOSTNAME="yourcomputersname"

1. we also need to configure the domain.

nano -w /etc/hosts

127.0.0.1 yourcomputersname.domain.com yourcomptuersname localhost

1. exit nano. to start networking automatically at boot,

rc-update add net.eth0 default

1. have numlock enabled at startup.

rc-update add numlock default

1. now its time for some system configuration. first, we need to create our fstab.

nano -w /etc/fstab

---

3. gr0x0rd's fstab

/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 noauto,noatime,user 1 2 /dev/sda3 / ext3 noatime 0 1 /dev/sda2 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom auto noauto,user 0 0

1. /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto 0 0

1. glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
2. POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
3. (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
4. use almost no memory if not populated with files)

shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0

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1. now, lets set the root password.

passwd