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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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What is wrong? "Syntax error: unexpected end of file"

I keep getting this error, do you guys know what is wrong? rapache is an alias for restart apache mugbear:/usr/bin# cat /usr/bin/mkdomain if [ -d "/srv/www/$1" ]; then echo "Domain $1 already…
Strawberry
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Debian (Lenny) how to Upgrade KVM to newer version?

I have Debian Lenny installed with the following KVM Version: QEMU PC emulator version 0.9.1 (kvm-72), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard => The Problem is, this version has a confirmed bug, that is however already fixed in newer releases for…
jens
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Have a Linux files server authenticating against Active Directory. Is it possible to auto-create a user's home directory?

I have a Debian box authenticating against our Active Directory and it's working well. Currently, only users who've logged into the server via SSH (against AD) have an directory they can access through SMB. The directory is created when the user…
jeffkolez
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How can I get the apt-get source of a backports package on Debian?

My current sources.list: ## main & security repositories deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main deb-src http://security.debian.org/…
meder omuraliev
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How can I make sure an init.d-script runs after network-interfaces received their addresses over DHCP?

I just installed couchdb on a debian5 system and added symlinks to the /etc/init.d/couchdb-script. Unfortunately, this script gets triggered on startup before the network interface received the address over DHCP that the couchdb-server tries to bind…
flitzwald
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how to reinstall pure-ftpd on debian?

because i had problems with my pure-ftpd i decided to completely remove and reinstall it. so i did like apt-get remove pure-ftpd-mysql find / -name "pure-ftpd" -exec rm -rf {} \; now after reinstalling the init.d script and other pieces are still…
Andreas Linden
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Problem with startup script

I am trying to get Chandler running on a debian box on startup under user 'chandler', and have tried the following script, locating it in init.d: #! /bin/sh # # /etc/init.d/chandler # RETVAL=$? CHANDLER_HOME="/chandler" # check input case "$1" in …
Unpossible
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What is the format of specifying 'http' repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list?

After specifying the url of the repository, what do the tags like 'stable','non-free' mean in the entries of /etc/apt/sources.list ? If we know the url of a repository, how do we decide about these additional attributes while adding an entry in…
twiggedtoday
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apc apc.shm_segments ignored apc.shm_size behaving weird in apache2

this is the current apc.ini extension=apc.so apc.enabled=1 apc.ttl=86400 apc.user_ttl=86400 apc.shm_segments=1 apc.shm_size=64 which gives me 1 Segment(s) with 64.0 MBytes (mmap memory, pthread mutex locking) the funny thing is that according to…
The Shurrican
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Debian Hostname refusing to stick

I'm using VirtualBox for testing and have the latest stable Debian. When I try to set the hostname of the machine using both: hostname ayil and editing /etc/hostname and running /etc/init.d/hostname.sh start to make sure it activated. Whenever I…
digital
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Users cleaning in debian

I'm running a webserver at slicehost and decided to delete unused/unnecessary users. But I really don't know which ones are necessary for the system to work I use it as apache webserver with mysql, php, memcached, ssh and proftpd. This is the list…
The Disintegrator
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Linux Server update / upgrade policy

I am running Debian Stable on all our servers. Debian Stable always gets security and other important updates time to time which includes Kernel Updates too. Do one have to immediately update all packages including kernel? What should be the most…
Abhishek A
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Which email server should I use for Debian?

I'm on Debian 5 and I want to set up an email server for POP3, IMAP and SMTP. I heard that there are several solutions for this out there, including Cyrus. What email server (that ideally supports those three protocols) would you recommend? Also, I…
Daniel
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Install PostgreSQL on Ubuntu without starting it

I want to install PostgreSQL 8.4 (or any service) on Ubuntu 10.4 (or any Linux distro) without it starting up as part of the installation. Right now when I do a sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.4 part of the installation process is Starting…
Everett Toews
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when running ps aux, it shows uids instead of users

I am running Debian 5.03. 2.6.18. When I run ps aux to look at running processes, some of them show the uid of the user, and others show the actual username. However if I run top, it shows the correct username, not their uid. Why is this…
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