Preface

Following guiding rules are followed while compiling this document.

	Warning
	You are expected to make good efforts to seek answers by yourself beyond this documentation. This document only gives efficient starting points.

You must seek solution by yourself from primary sources.

This document provides information through the following simplified presentation style with bash(1) shell command examples.

# command-in-root-account
$ command-in-user-account

These shell prompts distinguish account used and correspond to set environment variables as: "PS1='\$'" and "PS2=' '". These values are chosen for the sake of readability of this document and are not typical on actual installed system.

All command examples are run under the English locale "LANG=en_US.UTF8". Please don't expect the placeholder strings such as command-in-root-account and command-in-user-account to be translated in command examples. This is an intentional choice to keep all translated examples to be up-to-date.

	Note
	See the meaning of the "$PS1" and "$PS2" environment variables in bash(1).

Action required by the system administrator is written in the imperative sentence, e.g. "Type Enter-key after typing each command string to the shell."

The description column and similar ones in the table may contain a noun phrase following the package short description convention which drops leading articles such as "a" and "the". They may alternatively contain an infinitive phrase as a noun phrase without leading "to" following the short command description convention in manpages. These may look funny to some people but are my intentional choices of style to keep this documentation as simple as possible. These Noun phrases do not capitalize their starting nor end with periods following these short description convention.

A command snippet quoted in a text paragraph is referred by the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "aptitude safe-upgrade".

A text data from a configuration file quoted in a text paragraph is referred by the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "deb-src".

A command is referred by its name in the typewriter font optionally followed by its manpage section number in parenthesis, such as bash(1). You are encouraged to obtain information by typing the following.

$ man 1 bash

A manpage is referred by its name in the typewriter font followed by its manpage section number in parenthesis, such as sources.list(5). You are encouraged to obtain information by typing the following.

$ man 5 sources.list

An info page is referred by its command snippet in the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "info make". You are encouraged to obtain information by typing the following.

$ info make

A filename is referred by the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "/etc/passwd". For configuration files, you are encouraged to obtain information by typing the following.

$ sensible-pager "/etc/passwd"

A directory name is referred by the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "/etc/apt/". You are encouraged to explore its contents by typing the following.

$ mc "/etc/apt/"

A package name is referred by its name in the typewriter font, such as vim. You are encouraged to obtain information by typing the following.

$ dpkg -L vim
$ apt-cache show vim
$ aptitude show vim

A documentation may indicate its location by the filename in the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "/usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.txt.gz" and "/usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.html"; or by its URL, such as https://www.debian.org. You are encouraged to read the documentation by typing the following.

$ zcat "/usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.txt.gz" | sensible-pager
$ sensible-browser "/usr/share/doc/base-passwd/users-and-groups.html"
$ sensible-browser "https://www.debian.org"

An environment variable is referred by its name with leading "$" in the typewriter font between double quotation marks, such as "$TERM". You are encouraged to obtain its current value by typing the following.

$ echo "$TERM"

The popcon data is presented as the objective measure for the popularity of each package. It was downloaded on 2024-03-03 11:51:37 UTC and contains the total submission of 237734 reports over 198687 binary packages and 27 architectures.

The popcon number preceded with "V:" for "votes" is calculated by "1000 * (the popcon submissions for the package executed recently on the PC)/(the total popcon submissions)".

The popcon number preceded with "I:" for "installs" is calculated by "1000 * (the popcon submissions for the package installed on the PC)/(the total popcon submissions)".

The package size data is also presented as the objective measure for each package. It is based on the "Installed-Size:" reported by "apt-cache show" or "aptitude show" command (currently on amd64 architecture for the unstable release). The reported size is in KiB (Kibibyte = unit for 1024 bytes).

Please file bug reports on the debian-reference package using reportbug(1) if you find any issues on this document. Please include correction suggestion by "diff -u" to the plain text version or to the source.