Documentation
Debian
Cheat Sheet

Cheat Sheet

Download and burn ISO

Download Debian AMD64 ISO File

Balena Etcher and Rufus offer simple interfaces to select your ISO and target USB drive and handle the writing process.

Use case:

  • Create USB installation media from bootable ISOs
  • Flash a BIOS or a firmware with a low-level utility
  • Format USB, flash card and virtual drives to FAT/FAT32/NTFS/UDF/exFAT/ReFS/ext2/ext3
Name Differentiators Web Site
Balena Etcher Support Linux, macOS, and Windows Web + GitHub/balena-io/etcher
Rufus * Create Windows 11 installation drives for PCs that don’t have TPM or Secure Boot Web + GitHub/pbatard/rufus
Shutdown & restart

Restart: shutdown -r now

Shutdown: systemctl poweroff, shutdown -h now, or poweroff

System config

uname -a

  • sudo inxi -Fz
  • fastfetch1
  • hostnamectl
  • sudo apt list –installed
  • free -m
  • cat /proc/meminfo

Show current memory use in megabytes: free -m

Change hostname

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname server1 sudo hostnamectl set-hostname “Vivek’s Thinkpad” –pretty sudo vi /etc/hosts / Edit the file /etc/hosts and update entries:

How to change hostname on Debian 12/11/10 Linux

VIM https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8980410/cut-and-paste-multiple-lines-in-vim
Storage To list all disks with all their defined partitions, along with the size lsblk and df -m
Network List network interfaces: `ip link show`

Show your default gateway and routing tables: ip route | column -t

USB list details all USB and PCI buses and devices lsusb;lspci
Samba vi /etc/samba/smb.conf [global] workgroup = d5e.dev # This tells Samba to use a separate log file for each machine # that connects log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m

Cap the size of the individual 10g files (in KiB).

max log size = 1000

We want Samba to only 10g to /var/1og/samba/log. ismbd, nmbd}.

Append syslog@1 if you want important messages to be sent to syslog too.

logging = file

Do something sensible when Samba crashes: mail the admin a backtrace

panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d

[music] comment = Stored music (Roon) read only = no path = /media/music guest ok = no browseable = yes valid users = bhdicaire

[mbak] comment = Stored music (Roon) read only = no path = /media/mbak/ guest ok = no browseable = yes valid users = bhdicaire

[classic] comment = Stored music (Roon) read only = no path = /media/classic guest ok = no browseable = yes valid users = bhdicaire

  1. On Debian, a system summary (ASCII logo + hardware / OS info) is done with fastfetch (successor to neofetch) ↩︎