I use Gentoo Linux for most of my day to day work. There are a few configurations I have to set whenever I install a new machine. As I do this once every few years, I tend to forget these.
Dovecot
Dovecot is a mail server that I use to store mail on my laptop. I chose it because it supports storing mail in the ‘maildir’ format, where each mail is a file, and each folder a directory. The latenrative, and the default for Thunderbird is ‘mbox’ format, where each folder is a single file. I had a few near misses with corrupted mbox files, and the bigger files slowed down backups unacceptably.
10-auth.conf
Comment out the line
!include auth-ldap.conf.ext
10-mail.conf
Change the maildir line to read
mail_location = maildir:~/.maildir:LAYOUT=fs:DIRNAME=
Time Zone
Look for your timezone in /usr/share/zoneinfo. Please avoid the /usr/share/zoneinfo/Etc/GMT* timezones as their names do not indicate the expected zones. For instance, GMT-8 is in fact GMT+8.
Suppose you want to use Dublin’s timezone, edit /etc/timezone accordingly, like so:
root #nano -w /etc/timezoneEurope/Dublin
Running emerge for timezone-data will update your /etc/localtime file properly:
root #emerge --config timezone-dataVerify the new timezone information:
root #dateWed Mar 8 00:46:05 CET 2006