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Questions tagged [debian]

Debian is a popular and influential GNU/Linux distribution. Questions here should generally be about Debian Server.

Debian GNU/Linux its one of the oldest and more popular Linux distributions. The Debian project was started in 1993 by Ian Murdock (the name Debian is a junction of Debra + Ian, his girlfriend at the time). Debian strongest points are the portability, stability and commitment to the free software ideal.

The current Debian version (6.0, code named Squeeze) has more than 29.000 software packages available on nine platforms (including SPARC, ARM, PowerPC), and 2 platforms supporting the FreeBSD kernel (Debian GNU/kfreebsd on i386 and amd64). The Debian APT package management provides dependency management and strong update and upgrade capabilities.

Debian maintains normally 3 versions of its repositories: stable (the current release), testing (the next release), unstable (new packages and versions). After debian makes a new release, the previous stable release is maintained for one year, and is re-labed oldstable. Squeeze also included the backports repository where some software from the testing will be made available to the stable release, and updates (previously named volatile) to deal with software that evolves too fast. Debian also makes point releases with aggregated updates and updated tools, those keep the release name but update the version like Debian 6.1 for example.

Debian has a Social Contract with its users and will only distribute on its main distribution software that is compatible with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.Those two devices were created on the early days of the distribution and also are the basis for Open Source Initiative's Open Source Definition.

The Debian project organization counts with the Debian Project Leader, the Debian Project Secretary and the Debian Developers. The developers are responsible for the releases, packaging software, managing the FTPs, security and so on. Each Project Leader is elected for a period of one year and any Developer can be a candidate.

Ubuntu Linux uses Debian as its base, as well as other well known distributions like Maemo, Mint, Knoppix and several others. The Wikipedia article has also more details about the distribution, as well as Debian's official site.

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Anyone else experiencing high rates of Linux server crashes during a leap second day?

*NOTE: if your server still has issues due to confused kernels, and you can't reboot - the simplest solution proposed with gnu date installed on your system is: date -s now. This will reset the kernel's internal "time_was_set" variable and fix the…
Bron Gondwana
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How can I run Debian stable but install some packages from testing?

Say you're running a server and you don't want to upgrade to Testing (Squeeze) from Stable (Lenny) to just install a required package or two. What's the best way of installing only certain packages from Testing?
Gareth
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What's the best way of handling permissions for Apache 2's user www-data in /var/www?

Has anyone got a nice solution for handling files in /var/www? We're running Name Based Virtual Hosts and the Apache 2 user is www-data. We've got two regular users & root. So when messing with files in /var/www, rather than having to... chown -R…
Gareth
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List of files installed from apt package

How do I get a list of files that were or will-be installed when I apt-get a package? Conversely, can I find what package(s) caused a particular file to be installed?
David Nehme
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How to remove the "installed manually" flag and revert to "automatically installed" with apt-get?

To compile something, I needed the zlib1g-dev package to be installed so I launched an apt-get install zlib1g-dev. apt-get informed me nicely that the package was already auto-installed because of an other package, and that it understands that I…
Steve Schnepp
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How do I get apt-get to ignore some dependencies?

How do I make apt-get ignore some dependencies? For example, I wanted to install mailx so I can use it to send email from cron scripts/report-generating tools. However, installing mailx also installs exim4 and a whole bunch of dependencies (I…
FrancisV
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How to install/change locale on Debian?

I've written a web application for which the user interface is in Dutch. I use the system's date and time routines to format date strings in the application. However, the date strings that the system formats are in English but I want them in Dutch,…
Hongli Lai
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How to determine JAVA_HOME on Debian/Ubuntu?

On Ubuntu it is possible to have multiple JVMs at the same time. The default one is selected with update-alternatives. But this does not set the JAVA_HOME environment variable, due to a debian policy. I am writing a launcher script (bash), which…
Witek
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list all packages from a repository in ubuntu / debian

is there a command to see what packages are available from a certain ppa repository?
opensas
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mysqldump to a tar.gz

Usually after dumping a MySQL database with mysqldump command I immediately tar/gzip the resultant file. I'm looking for a way to do this in one command: So from this: mysqldump dbname -u root -p > dbname.sql tar czvf dbname.sql.tgz dbname.sql rm…
pygorex1
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How can I export the privileges from MySQL and then import to a new server?

I know how to export/import the databases using mysqldump & that's fine but how do I get the privileges into the new server. For extra points, there are a couple of existing databases on the new one already, how do I import the old servers…
Gareth
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Is it possible to reboot a Linux OS without rebooting the hardware?

Is there a way to reboot a Linux system (Debian in particular) without rebooting the hardware? I have a RAID controller that takes a bit to get itself running before the OS starts up, and I would like it if there was a way to quickly reboot the…
lacrosse1991
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How can I list my open ports on Debian?

What is the command to display a list of open ports on a Debian server? I tried netstat -a | egrep 'Proto|LISTEN' but I would like something more specific that actually lists the port number.
leonel
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What does "debconf: delaying package configuration, since apt-utils is not installed" mean?

I have just installed Debian and I was just installing some packages using apt-get instal when I saw this message: debconf: delaying package configuration, since apt-utils is not installed What does this mean? And once I have installed apt-utils…
David
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What should I do when I got the KEYEXPIRED error message after an apt-get update?

While updating my packages on a debian based system by a sudo apt-get update I've got that error message : Reading package lists... Done W: GPG error: ftp://ftp.fr.debian.org stable/non-US Release: The following signatures were invalid:…
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