Here a brief overview of the most important configuration files. Gentoo has a protection mechanism to
not automatically overwrite the config files (in the protected directories, usually
/etc
) during updates. To know what got changed, can
be found out using the /var/lib/portage/config
file that holds the checksums of the original files. There are also GUI tools
not dedicated to a single Linux distribution to maintain and configure Linux:
emerge webmin
It might be worth to have a backup (See http://www.linurs.org/genservice.html).
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Configuration of boot loader grub |
|
Link to timezone |
|
Contains domain name |
|
Contains name of this computer |
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Contains default gateway and network settings |
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Contains devices to be mounted FD, CD ROM, HD, or default settings for mounting |
|
Defines group membership of users |
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Contains other hosts and their IP addresses |
|
Is the most important of them all contains CPU info usefags and more |
|
Modules (e.g. HW) that have to be loaded at start up |
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Defines user accounts |
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Contains global configuration settings e.g. unicode |
|
Configuration of X server |
They however influence system behavior significantly:
|
USE variables e.g. kde qt |
|
Contains path to programs and default editors, points to
|
|
Contains domain name and nameserver IP |