Things to do after a fresh install, What to do after installing a new SL

[makhlaghi]

Hi everyone,
It is about one year I have totally transfered to Linux and about 6 months that I have moved to Scientific Linux; In other words I am a beginner! I had made notes of the necessary things I needed after each install of Linux, recently I thought of placing my notes on my webpage so other new commers to linux can use it: Since I think such a page would have really helped me the first day I installed Linux. This is the webpage:
http://astr.tohoku.ac.jp/~akhlaghi/newlinux.html

Since most of the people here are by far much more experienced than me, I would be most grateful to any one reading this topic to have a look at my notes and advise me on any possible inconsistencies or problems in my explanations or better ways to express what I have said that can help a new commer to Scientific Linux.

Thanks...

[redman]

Every reaction you will get here is subject to personal choices.
That means that everyone needs to decide for themselves what to do.
They are suggestions and subject to discussion

For myself, things I do when I do a clean/fresh installation (with Gnome) on a desktop computer are:
1) remove yum-autoupdate
2) install gconf-editor and configure nautilus to always use the same window (instead of opening dozens of them):
conf-editor -> apps -> nautilus -> preferences -> always_use_browser (check mark).
3) Add the "show desktop" icon bottom left of the screen.

All the rest is personal choice by installing/remove packages.

Servers is a different story because things depend of what you want to do with it.

[joka]

Some remarks to TexLive: You don't need to download or install 2GByte of TeX software.
Download and call install-tl and chose a minimal (or base) scheme which contains besides of basic TeX software the TeXLive Manager tlmgr, see also Post CTAN.

CODE

cd /tmp # or your preferred download directory wget http://mirror.ctan.org/systems/texlive/tlnet/install-tl-unx.tar.gz tar -zxvf install-tl-unx.tar.gz cd install-tl-* yum install perl-Tk perl-Tk-Text-SuperText perl-Tk-TableMatrix ./install-tl -gui

The 3 extra perl packages are necessary to run the GUI of install-tl and tlmgr.
With tlmgr one can add or update TeX packages, groups and schemes - including beamer and pgf.

[makhlaghi]

Thank you very much for your replies,
They were both very interesting. I will implement them but had two questions from redman:

I agree with you that most of the list is very personal, I just hope it can be useful for beginners, so they see one example of how to personalize their Linux (something I really craved when I first installed a Linux distro). But I just had two questions:

1. Why is it good to remove yum-autoupdate? I thought it is very convenient to have it!

2. I wasn't familiar with gconf-editor, thanks for introducing it to me, it is very interesting to set all the preferences in one place! But after trying out the process you explained for nautilus, I felt it has the same effect as my explanation: When I unchecked the box in gconf-editor, the "Always open in browser windows" box in the nautilus preferences would turn off. And the other way round. They seem to be the same, am I correct?

[Bluejay]

QUOTE (makhlaghi @ Apr 5 2012, 07:40 PM)

1. Why is it good to remove yum-autoupdate? I thought it is very convenient to have it!

That's one of those choices people have to make. It depends on how you manage changes to your systems. For a server that's under strict change control, having it suddenly update is evil. For a desktop that sees every Internet-borne attack, having all the up-to-the-minute security fixes installed daily is essential. And there's a whole range of possibilities in between.