System administration
- Devices and disk access.
- Users, groups and passwords.
- Language and keyboard.
- Install the Bash shell.
- Set the system time.
- Execute scheduled commands.
- Add commands at boot time.
Devices and disk access
With Linux your disks and USB media are seen as devices. To access them you must
first mount a device on a mount point (directory). On SliTaz you can graphically
mount devices using mountbox
or use the command line. To mount the
first disk of a local hard disk on /mnt/disk
:
# mkdir -p /mnt/disk # mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/disk
To mount a cdrom or an USB media you should use mount points located in
/media
. Note that for a cdrom, you just have to specify
the device path and for a flash key the mount point already exists:
# mount /dev/cdrom # mount /dev/sda1 /media/flash
ntfs filesystem
If you need read/write access to Windows ntfs filesystems you must install a
few additional packages from the mirror. The ntfs-3g
driver
provides stable access to ntfs partitions and ntfsprogs
provides
manipulation tools dependent on fuse
. Note that you can format, move or resize
ntfs partitions graphically with Gparted.
Users, groups and passwords
To manage users and groups on your SliTaz system you must use the command line, but file permissions can be changed graphically using the emelFM2 file manager. To add or remove users and groups you must be root. Root can also change all user passwords and a single user can only change his/her own password. To add or remove a user named linux:
# adduser linux # deluser linux
To add or remove a group you must use addgroup
or
delgroup
. To change the current user password or change the
password of a specific user, you must use the command passwd
:
$ passwd # passwd username
Audio group
If you want a new user to be able to listen to music he must be in the
audio
group. To add an existing user to the audio group:
# adduser -G audio user_name
Language and keyboard layout
SliTaz saves the configuration of the default locale in /etc/locale.conf
which is read by /etc/profile
on each login and the keyboard
setting is stored in /etc/kmap.conf
. These two files can be
edited with your favorite editor or configured respectively with
tazlocale
and tazkmap
. You can modify the settings
you chose on the first boot by typing as root administrator:
# tazlocale Or: # tazkmap
To check all available locales or your current configuration you can use the
command locale
as a single user or root (C for English):
$ locale -a $ locale
Bash Shell
On SliTaz you have the ash and sh shell with a link to Ash, this shell is
provided by Busybox. If you wish to use the Bash (Bourne Again SHell), first
as root
install bash, copy the .profile
found in your
home directory and rename it .bashrc
, then edit the
/etc/passwd
file with your favorite text editor and change your
shell to :/bin/bash
# tazpkg get-install bash # cp /home/hacker/.profile home/hacker/.bashrc # Note root user: cp /home/hacker/.profile ~/.bashrc # nano /etc/passwd # :/bin/bash
The next time you login bash will be your default shell, you can confirm this
by typing env
in the command line.
System Time
To know the current system time, you can simply type date
. On
SliTaz, the timezone configuration file is saved in /etc/TZ
, you
can edit with your favorite text editor or simply echo
the changes.
To view the available timezones, you can look in the
/usr/share/zoneinfo
directory.
Here's an example using the timezone Europe/London:
# echo "Europe/London" > /etc/TZ
Rdate
To syncronize the system clock with a network time server, you can as the
root
administrator use the rdate -s
command:
# rdate -s tick.greyware.com
To display the time on the remote server, use the rdate -p
command.
$ rdate -p tick.greyware.com
Hwclock
Hwclock allows you to syncronize the time of your hardware clock to the system clock or vice versa.
Syncronize the system clock to the hardware clock ( --utc = universal time, -l = local time):
# hwclock -w --utc
Syncronize the hardware clock to the system clock:
# hwclock -s --utc
Execute scheduled commands
The daemon 'crond' allows you to run commands automatically at a scheduled specific date or time. This is very
useful for routine tasks such as system administration. The directory cron uses is
/var/spool/cron/crontabs
.
Each user of the system can have his/her own tasks, they are defined in the file: /var/spool/cron/crontabs/user
.
The crontab utility allows you amongst other things, to list the tasks specific to the user. The syntax of the
files is as follows:
mm hh dd MMM DDD command > log
We will create a file with root priviledges and test the daemon 'crond' with a task performed every minute -
writing the date to a file /tmp/crond.test. It should be noted that the utility has an option
crontab
for editing cron file using 'vi', this is not provided by SliTaz. In it's place you can use
GNU nano (<Ctrl+X> to save & exit):
# nano /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root
* * * * * date >> /tmp/crond.test
Launch crond
with the option -b
(background),
configured via /etc/daemons.conf
and using the startup script:
# /etc/init.d/crond start
You can wait a few minutes and view the contents of the file: /tmp/crond.test... OK:
# cat /tmp/crond.test
To stop or restart the daemon crond:
# /etc/init.d/crond stop Or : # /etc/init.d/crond restart
Invoke the daemon crond on every boot
To launch the daemon 'crond' each time you boot the system, just add it to the variable START_DAEMONS
in the configuration file /etc/rcS.conf
, either before or after the web server or SSH server.
Add commands to be executed at boot
During the boot process, various scripts are executed to configure services, such as the start of the
web server, networking etc. On SliTaz there is a script /etc/init.d/local.sh
which allows
you to add commands to be launched at system startup. You can also create new scripts in /etc/init.d,
their links in /etc/rc.scripts for shell scripts and use /etc/rc.d for links to the startup script daemon in
/etc/rcS.conf:
# nano /etc/init.d/local.sh