general_recommendations [yiffOS Wiki]

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====== General Recommendations ======

After installing yiffOS, you may want to change some of the defaults and add more functionally to your system. Listed in this article are some basic recommendations to help secure your new system and install some basic software. 

===== First Steps =====
This section goes through some basic system setup.

==== Create a regular (unprivileged) user account ====
It is generally [[https://serverfault.com/a/57964|recommended]] to use Linux as a regular or unprivileged user account and only escalate to root when needed. To do this, you can use the ''useradd'' command:
<code>
$ useradd -m <username>
</code>
(Adding ''-m'' will create a home directory for the new user, which is generally recommended)

You'll need to set a password for the new account in order to log in, you can do that with ''passwd'': 
<code>
$ passwd <username>
</code>

If you need to access root from this account, you can add the newly created user account to the ''wheel'' group: 
<code>
$ usermod -aG wheel <username>
</code>

You'll then be able to use ''sudo'' to temporarily gain root privileges.

==== Changing root's password ====
By default, root's password is very insecure as the login details is root:root, it is highly recommended that you change the password.

Using sudo or as the root account, use ''passwd'' to change root's password to a much more secure password: 
<code>
$ passwd root
</code>

==== Editing the start up message ====
You can modify the start up text by editing ''/etc/issue'' as root. This file also accepts certain escape sequences in order to display special information about the system: 
<code>
b Insert the baudrate of the current line. 
d Insert the current date. 
s Insert the system name, the name of the operating system. 
l Insert the name of the current tty line. 
m Insert the architecture identifier of the machine, e.g., x86-64. 
n Insert the nodename of the machine, also known as the hostname. 
o Insert the domainname of the machine. r Insert the release number of the kernel, e.g., 5.14.7. 
t Insert the current time. 
u Insert the number of current users logged in. 
U Insert the string "1 user" or "<n> users" where <n> is the number of current users logged in.
v Insert the version of the OS, e.g., the build-date etc.
</code>