diochnos/tips/customizing

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General Information

General information about what sort of customizations can be found in this webpage.

Regarding linux, the distribution that I have in mind is debian.

Linux

Information specific to linux will show up here.

Terminal Related

Below are my standard customizations for using the terminal.

.bash_aliases

This is the file that I am using.

.bashrc

I introduce the following two lines in the top of .bashrc:

.bash_profile

This is the file that I am using.

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X Windows

Below are some standard customizations using X Windows.

.xinitrc

This is the file that I am using (debian squeeze + WindowMaker).

.Xresources

This is the file that I am using (debian squeeze + WindowMaker).

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lpr

For double-sided (portrait) printing lpr needs the option: -o sides=two-sided-long-edge

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Basic Group Handling

Here is a good source.

Apache - PHP

In order to make apache work and enable PHP the following should be done:

Port Forwarding

In order to make Apache responsive to the outside world we have to forward the following ports and protocols:

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Raspberry Pi Related

Version of Raspberry Pi

cat /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/model; echo

Raspberry Pi OS and Architecture Information

cat /etc/os-release

uname -a

Find All Things Listening to Ports

lsof -l -n -P | grep LISTEN

NMAP

There are several useful commands - though DO NOT FORGET TO ASK FOR PERMISSION if you are scanning a LAN that is not yours! No matter how innocent the scan may be. Prepending with sudo gives more information. Some examples follow.

fail2ban

Copy /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf to /etc/fail2ban/jail.local and edit that file. I tend to give bantime at least 1800 instead of the 600 default seconds. Maximum number of retries also changes to 3 from 6.

Pi-hole

Some modifications may be needed when running Apache by default. See here.

VPN Related

We can use pivpn. We can create additional profiles using `pivpn add`.

Network Troubleshooting

Here are some useful commands:

Dealing with IPv6 time-outs for apt-get update/upgrade

Updating/upgrading the system using apt-get, times out for some servers when using IPv6. Instead one can use commands like the following one and force the use of IPv4.

apt-get -o Acquire::ForceIPv4=true update/upgrade

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LaTeX

Information specific to texlive.

Path for Packages

Up until debian squeeze (6.0) the directory for the packages of texlive used to be /usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/latex. However, after migrating to wheezy (7.0) it appears that this path has moved to /usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex.

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Convert Images to Encapsulated Postscript Files

Oftentimes I want to introduce a screenshot to my slides (say, using beamer). The conversion can be done with the command:

convert image.png image.eps

However, a more useful version of the above command is probably the one that creates the minimum size for the eps file:

convert image.png eps3:image.eps

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MAC OS

Information specific to MAC OS will show up here.

igraph

After upgrading to Mavericks (10.9.x) I installed MacPorts under a custom directory: /opt/macports/latest. For the configuration of the latest igraph version 0.7.0 (as of this writing; link) I used the following command:

./configure LIBS=-L/opt/macports/latest/lib CFLAGS=-I/opt/macports/latest/include --prefix=/opt/igraph/0.7.0-pre

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