Gentoo configuration

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/timezone
Europe/Dublin

Running emerge for timezone-data will update your /etc/localtime file properly:

root #emerge --config timezone-data

Verify the new timezone information:

root #date
Wed Mar  8 00:46:05 CET 2006

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