Customizing Linux Systems

This page will show you how to customize certain aspects of a Linux system, be it a desktop or a server.

In most cases it is sufficient to apply minor changes to a standard system to make it work as intended.

Also, please, keep in mind to apply changes with minimum side effects, for example by making them optable.

Thunderbird

24 Hour Time Format for Lightning

A default lightning installation usually comes with US type date/time representation.

To make lightning have it's default date time representation some environmental variables have to be set accordingly.

One way to accomplish this by keeping the goals described above results in a minor modification to the thunderbird executable main script (e.g. /usr/lib64/thunderbird/thunderbird.sh).

Adding the following lines near the top of the file:

# read customized system environment
sys_config="/etc/sysconfig/$MOZ_APPNAME"
[ -f "$sys_config" ] && . $sys_config
usr_config="$HOME/.$MOZ_APPNAME/.sysconfig" 
[ -f "$usr_config" ] && . $usr_config

by adding this patch:

*** /usr/lib64/thunderbird/thunderbird.sh.orig  Wed Jun 26 16:02:55 2013
--- /usr/lib64/thunderbird/thunderbird.sh       Mon Jul 22 12:37:35 2013
***************
*** 59,64 ****
--- 59,70 ----
  MOZ_APPNAME="thunderbird"
  MOZ_PROGRAM="$MOZ_DIST_LIB/$MOZ_APPNAME-bin"
  
+ # read customized system environment
+ sys_config="/etc/sysconfig/$MOZ_APPNAME"
+ [ -f "$sys_config" ] && . $sys_config
+ usr_config="$HOME/.$MOZ_APPNAME/.sysconfig"
+ [ -f "$usr_config" ] && . $usr_config
+ 
  MOZ_APP_LAUNCHER="$MOZ_DIST_LIB/$MOZ_APPNAME.sh"
  if [ "$0" = "$MOZ_APP_LAUNCHER" ]; then
    [ -h "/usr/bin/$MOZ_APPNAME" ] && \

will allow to read in no, user specific or system wide thunderbird related environmental settings, depending on the existence and content of the files referred to.

Thus a user willing to change her thunderbird's and thus her lightning's date/time representation to a 24 hour scheme then would just have to place the following lines in a file named .thunderbird/.sysconfig in her home directory:

LC_TIME=de_DE
export LC_TIME

The same content in /etc/sysconfg/thunderbird would apply this date/time setting to the whole system resp. all thunderbird users.

Root Mails

To avoid a root mail sink you always should redirect mails for root to a dedicated administrative mail address or mailing list.

In case it is supported by your locally configured mail system you just need to add something like the following lines to your hosts /etc/aliases:

# customization for /etc/aliases
# send root mails to system administrators

root: sysadmin@mpdl.mpg.de

After editing yu must issue the newaliases command to reflect your changes.

# newaliases
/etc/aliases: 41 aliases, longest 20 bytes, 489 bytes total