2025-02-28

Debian#

Some notes from my Debian 5.0 (lenny) to 12.0 (bookworm) server experiences.

Releases#

https://www.debian.org/releases/

Number

Codename

5

lenny

6

squeeze

7

wheezy

8

jessie

9

stretch

10

buster

11

bullseye

12

bookworm

Hostname#

Set hostname for IPv4 and IPv6 on loopback interface:

hostname=foo
domain=felixhummel.de
fqdn=$hostname.$domain

cat <<EOF > /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
# fqdn first for "hostname -f"
127.0.1.1 $fqdn $hostname

::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
EOF

echo $hostname > /etc/hostname
hostname -F /etc/hostname
exec $SHELL

hostname
hostname -f
python3 -c 'import socket; print(socket.getfqdn())'

Git 1.9 on Debian Wheezy#

apt-get -t wheezy-backports install git
echo 'deb http://cloudfront.debian.net/debian wheezy-backports main' \
    >> /etc/apt/sources.list

Debian Locale#

Error:

perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LANG = "en_US.utf8"
    are supported and installed on your system.

Fix (non-interactive):

export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
cp /etc/locale.gen /etc/locale.gen.bak
cat <<'EOF' > /etc/locale.gen
de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
en_DK.UTF-8 UTF-8
EOF
dpkg-reconfigure locales

Note that en_DK is useful for LC_TIME, because it is English with ISO date.

Set Default Locale#

I want English messages, but German values and ISO time (thanks, Denmark!).

cat <<'EOF' > /etc/default/locale
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_DK.UTF-8"
EOF

Add Another Locale#

E.g. for German UTF-8:

grep de_DE.UTF-8 /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED
echo "de_DE.UTF-8 UTF-8" >> /var/lib/locales/supported.d/local
export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
dpkg-reconfigure locales

Python 2.6 On Debian Lenny#

http://www.saltycrane.com/blog/2008/10/installing-python-26-source-ubuntu-hardy/:

sudo apt-get --no-install-recommends install build-essential\
                                             libncursesw5-dev\
                                             libreadline5-dev\
                                             libssl-dev\
                                             libgdbm-dev\
                                             libbz2-dev\
                                             libc6-dev\
                                             libsqlite3-dev\
                                             tk-dev
wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6/Python-2.6.tgz
tar xzf Python-2.6.tgz
cd Python-2.6
./configure --prefix=/opt/python2.6
make
# ignore bsddb185 sunaudiodev
sudo make install

Exim 4 for outgoing Mail#

Set static FQDN by setting it as the first line in /etc/hosts, e.g.:

127.0.0.1   mx1.example.org mx1
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