YouHaveDownloaded.com claims to track the IP addresses of people who use BitTorrent, but I’ve been torrenting Linux ISOs for months, pushing almost 200 GB of data, and the IP address of that box is not in their database. I don’t know what their methodology is, but they’re obviously not interested in people sharing legal files.
I love Debian and use it all the time. The only problem for me is that gnome-desktop-environment installs a lot of applications that I don’t need, like Evolution, Remmina, and Liferea. So, here’s how I install Debian.
1. During installation, select only the Base System. No desktop environment or GUI.
2. Log in as root, and set up sudo for your regular user account (yes, I learned Linux on Ubuntu).
apt-get install sudo vim visudo
Add a line below the root line, so it looks like this, obviously replacing “user” with your actual username:
root ALL=(ALL) ALL user ALL=(ALL) ALL
Now install the following packages:
apt-get install xorg metacity gnome-session gnome-panel gnome-terminal gnome-themes gdm3
This will pull about 460 packages, constituting 275 MB, but it will get you a basic Gnome desktop on which you can install only the apps that you want. At this point, the “installation” phase is finished. You can either reboot or type “startx” to log into Gnome.
3. However, I like to install a few other things right away.
apt-get install gconf-editor iceweasel gcalctool network-manager gnome-system-log pidgin xchat eog
Then separately,
apt-get install --install-recommends vlc
The reason for the separate installation of vlc is that you’ll get more codecs this way, but you don’t want to install all the recommended packages for the other stuff.
And that’s about it. You can add other repositories to get newer versions of some software, like Iceweasel 4, and install the latest version of LibreOffice manually.
To get specs on a machine, there’s the obvious stuff:
cat /proc/cpuinfo
df -H
free -m
ifconfig -a
sudo lshw > hardware.txt
But to test the disk I/O performance, you can do this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
Then you’ll also have a 1 GB file that you can wget to test the bandwidth.