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.
Using nano
- Open files for writing using the command nano -w /path/to/file
- Search for text using Ctrl-w (press Ctrl-w again to find next instance)
- Delete an entire line of text using Ctrl-k
- Save the file and exit nano using Ctrl-x
There are many options in Linux for setting the system clock. By setting the clock to local, it will read the time from the system BIOS. Set the timezone here as well.
# nano -w /etc/conf.d/clock
file: /etc/conf.d/clock
CLOCK="local" ... TIMEZONE="America/Vancouver"
To finish setting the system time zone, you can create a symbolic link to the file relating to your region stored in /usr/share/zoneinfo/. In this example I use the Canada Pacific (Vancouver) setting.
# unlink /etc/localtime # ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Canada/Pacific /etc/localtime
For your system to be recognized by name by others on the network you'll need to set the hostname. Your system's hostname is stored in the file /etc/conf.d/hostname. Simply replace yourcomputersname with your computer's name.
# nano -w /etc/conf.d/hostname
file: /etc/conf.d/hostname
HOSTNAME="yourcomputersname"
The system domain is set in the file /etc/conf.d/net. Simply replace yourdomain with your domain.
# nano -w /etc/conf.d/net
file: /etc/conf.d/net
... dns_domain_lo="yourdomain" ...
To complete the networking configuration we'll configure our /etc/hosts file. This is the same as the C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file in Windows.
# nano -w /etc/hosts
file: /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 yourcomputersname.domain.com yourcomptuersname localhost
- now its time for some system configuration. first, we need to create our fstab.
nano -w /etc/fstab
- 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
- /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto 0 0
- glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
- POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
- (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
- use almost no memory if not populated with files)
shm /dev/shm tmpfs nodev,nosuid,noexec 0 0
- now, lets set the root password.
passwd