Post-installation

After installation, there are several things you may want to do. You can do those either while still in the chroot (when installing from live media) or after your first boot.

Create a user

Immediately after installation, you will typically only have the root user. You should not be using root as your regular user. Creating one is easy:

# useradd myuser

Set a password, so you can log in:

# passwd myuser

While at it, you might want to add your user to some groups. This is not strictly necessary. Some groups that might be useful:

  • wheel is the local administrator group
  • kvm will let your user handle virtual machines
  • plugdev will let you access removable devices where there is no other (e.g. policy-based) mechanism
  • audio and video might be necessary to access audio/video devices, but on most systems this is not necessary thanks to elogind and similar

To add your user to a group or groups:

# usermod -a -G wheel,kvm myuser

You should avoid adding your user to groups you do not strictly need.

Set a hostname

The system hostname is set by writing it into /etc/hostname. Therefore, simply do the following:

# echo chimera > /etc/hostname

Set your time zone

The time zones are in /usr/share/zoneinfo. Setting the default time zone is done by symlinking it to /etc/localtime. For example, if your time zone is Europe/Prague, you can do the following:

# ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Prague /etc/localtime

The default is UTC.

Hardware clock

By default, the hardware clock in Chimera is stored as UTC. Typically this does not matter, but if you are e.g. dual booting with Windows, which does not use UTC, this will result in a conflict. You can mitigate this by making Chimera use localtime (or you can make Windows use UTC).

If you want to adjust Chimera, you can do something like this:

# echo localtime > /etc/hwclock

You can explicitly set utc in a similar manner if you wish.

Console setup

Chimera uses the same console-setup system as Debian. Most users should not have any reason to change things, but if you want to tweak things such as console keymap and font, you can tweak them in the same manner.

There are two files that should be of interest:

  • /etc/default/console-setup configures the console (e.g. font)
  • /etc/default/keyboard configures the keyboard (e.g. keymap)

Both files have detailed man pages, see man 5 console-setup as well as man 5 keyboard.

System logging

The default logging system on Chimera is syslog-ng, which is part of base-full. Enable the syslog daemon as follows:

# dinitctl enable syslog-ng

By default logs are written to /var/log/messages.

Additional software

The Package management will tell you how to manage repos, as well as be an overall good starting point for other things.