Debian

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Documentation
Debian Wiki

Overview

Debian is a lightweight, stable, and mature linux distribution that has been around since 1993 and has over 29,000 software packages. The package design is quite modular, which allows developers to pick exactly what is needed for their project without building everything from source. Technologic Systems' default user account is 'root' with no password. Some pre-2014 systems also include a user account 'eclipse' with the password 'eclipse'.

Network Configuration

You can change the default IP address of 192.168.0.50 to something that suits your network a little more. If you're interested in setting up a dynamic IP address, simply use the "dhclient" command from within Debian or "udhcpc" from within the busybox/fastboot environment. Older versions of Debian will use "pump" instead of dhclient. If you'd like a bit more control over the IP address, you can set the SBC up with a static IP address. From within Debian, edit "/etc/network/interfaces" to reflect the changes you'd like to make:

  # Used by ifup(8) and ifdown(8). See the interfaces(5) man page or
  # /usr/share/doc/ifupdown/examples for more information.

  auto eth0
  #iface eth0 inet dhcp
  iface eth0 inet static
          address 192.168.1.100
          network 192.168.1.0
          netmask 255.255.255.0
          broadcast 192.168.1.255
          gateway 192.168.1.1

  #auto eth1
  #iface eth1 inet dhcp

Then, edit the "/etc/resolv.conf" file to reflect the DNS servers:

  #domain ts-local.net
  #search ts-local.net
  nameserver 208.67.222.222
  nameserver 208.67.220.220

Now, reset the eth0 interface by using the command:

ifdown eth0; ifup eth0

Test the connection using the command:

ping google.com

For more advanced networking, see Debian's documentation

Package Management

Debian will offer better documentation on this subject, but this should be enough to get started.

Update packages

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Install packages

apt-get update
apt-get install python2.4

Remove packages

apt-get remove python2.4

Search for packages

apt-cache search nmap

Aging and Obsolescence

Debian, like many other operating system packages, is continually evolving and changing. There comes a time in the lifespan of every revision when it is no longer in the organization's best interest to maintain active development on an older version. When this happens in Debian, the organization signifies this by moving the distribution to its archives. These are rarely or never updated, but provide an archival and functional repository for package versions through the current version when the distribution was placed in archive. This allows older systems and implementations to continue to operate into the foreseeable future with only a small change to the core OS filesystem. Further information on this topic is documented on Debian's web site here.