What's the first thing you do when you take ownership of a *NIX-account?
 

I'm sure there're old threads in this vein, but I'm bored and looking for new input (I feel like I've read the entire interwebs which is obviously ludicrous) so rather than revive an old thread I'm gonna start a new one. If it's against the rules by all means delete it. :)

I've always used Debian. I suspect for historic reasons only. What I mean by that is that Debian is the distro that, to me, seemed friendly at the time. I vividly remember actually buying a 1000+ page old-timey book about Linux in general 20 years ago. A book that quickly deteriorated (it being a paperback. :) ) but I learned the package-manager commands (I'm one of those people who like to do everything from the CLI. It's not that I don't appreciate a GUI, it's just what are you gonna do the day the GUI fails?). I find myself most comfortable on Debian and more in control if I know what to do from the command line.

This seems to me to have been a good move as it's my understanding that Ubuntu - being based on Debian, no? - is the most user-friendly of the distros right now. I may be wrong; I'm sure a lot of other Linux-fans have good reasons for using other distros. I dabbled in Mepis once but I've been out of the loop for too long to know the status of that one (a quick wiki-search gives me the impression that it's a dead heRring).

But, what I do when I find myself with an account on a POSIX system, or indeed, with a root account (and yes, I know the Ubuntu philosphy on that point :) ) is to install "ddate", and "fortune" and edit .bashrc along these lines:

Code:

---

uname -a
echo
ddate
echo
fortune
echo

---

The prompt doesn't really concern me that much.

If I'm on a system with X (maybe connecting with x2go) I install rxvt-unicode and make sure I have a sexy transparent CLI so I can see whatever desktop background picture I find sexy at the time. :)



[EDIT:]
This should really go in the sticky at the top:

LYNX can sometimes be a real lifesaver when you're stuck without X and need your "fellow" geeks. I guess installing "lynx" would be up there as one of my first actions. Together with "screen" and "irssi". :)
[/EDIT]

What are your POSEXY idiosyncrazies :) ?


Regards,
Søren.

I must ignore some aspects of your post, as I cannot get them into the context that your subject-line imposes (“to make abstraction” turns out to be a direct translation of « faire abstraction » in French, which I do not understand either...). Even in plain German I cannot get all of them into one coherent answer-post. But all that I wrote until here, is off-topic. Where does it get you?

You have tried 2 distributions and conclude that for you, Ubuntu is the “most user-friendly of the distros right now”. Leave it that way, it does not hurt.

When I have an account on a POSIX system, I will ask myself first, who had given me that account and to which purpose. All that follows depends on the response to this question.

Depends on what the account is for. But if doing any real work there I'd typically setup dotfiles with homeshick and if spending a lot of time there, setup myrepos.

Evo2.

At first I thought you were asking what would one do if they were "inheriting" a POSIX account---as in previously used account. My response would have been: "Issue `groups' to see what you might have special access to and, by all means, tread carefully".

For a brand new account: I tend to create all the subdirectories I expect I'll be using under $HOME (bin, devel, docs, etc, include, lib, log, tmp, and others like that), tweak my PATH to look at my "bin" directory, define some aliases I prefer (or load them from a tar archive or USB drive), setup a ".forward" file. Other things will be defined once some real work begins.

(Great timing for this question. I'll be starting a new project soon and ought to get a tar archive ready containing my favored aliases, scripts, and so on, to load onto a new laptop... once I get Cygwin installed, that is.)

Cheers...

Change the passwords for root & your user - install mc & mpg123, (if they aren't already installed) - then Firefox, cause that's what I'm comfortable using - add my music - then maybe some other programs as I find a need for them.

The first thing I always do is put in some aliases (e.g. ls = ls --color, rm = rm -i). With Debian and derivatives, I had a set of standard "apt-x" aliases that gave me access to basic dpkg/deb commands for listing contents of packages, getting info on a package, or finding out where an orphan file belonged. Fortunately with Slackware that's not necessary as the package management system provides all that just by using ls and grep.

Besides "log in"?

I do extremely little tuning, or customizing. Doing those things take time and effort to maintain. I find I can use any system because I understand how to get around without any shortcuts or aliases.