Customizing Linux

Here are some tweaks you can make to various parts of Linux to make the whole experience a little easier and more intuitive. This guide is for Ubuntu and Debian flavours of Linux.

Change the Config Editor to Nano

The Debian default editor is Joe, if you do not know this text editor, change it to one you know, i.e. Nano. This command gives you all the options you have available so you can select the editor you wish to use…

sudo update-alternatives --config editor

Now, commands that use the default editor such as visudo will use your chosen editor.

Turn off passwords for a User

Once the config editor is nano, you can edit the sudoers file with the visudo command…

sudo visudo

One thing you might want to do is turn off passwords for yourself so that you do not have to keep typing the password when you run sudo commands. Add this like near the end of the file, after the “%sudo” group line…

myuser ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

Tweak Nano

Some changes I like to make when I first set up Linux are on Nano. I like to put smooth-scrolling on and to turn the keypad back to numeric. To do this, edit the nano config file by running this command as either root or with sudo…

sudo nano /etc/nanorc

Installing More Than One Version of PHP

To list all the versions of PHP that are installed you can type…

update-alternatives --list php

This then allows you to switch between them if you have more than one installed at any one time. Really this is more useful on a development machine, it is probably not needed on a web server.