Post Installation

You should set a password for the root account. Type:

passwd

Then enter the new password in the prompts (No characters or *'s will appear as you type your password but it IS being entered).

Unix systems always run the clock using UTC time (sometimes named as Greenwich time). You should adjust the timezone setting to have the dates shown by utilities to be like your wall clock. Type:

echo export TZ=Europe/Amsterdam > /etc/rc.timezone

or

echo export TZ=America/New_York > /etc/rc.timezone

The timezone will be set when you log in again.

Of course, you should adjust Europe/Amsterdam according to your location. You can look into the /usr/share/zoneinfo hierarchy to find the correct name. The general principle is continent/city or ocean/city, where city is the English name of the biggest city in the same timezone as you. The city would ideally be in your country, since timezone rules have a strong tendency to vary according to national rules.

You can use the hostname(1) command to manually set the system hostname. For example:

# hostname minix.example.com

/!\ When DHCP is enabled, your settings will be overriden by the DHCP client when renewing the lease.

By default, MINIX runs a DHCP client at boot time, to request an IP address from your DHCP server.

In this case, typically you will not know what the IP address will be and so providing a host name for the system has no functional purpose. But, if you arrange for your DHCP server to always assign the same address to your MINIX system, based on the machine's MAC address, then naming the MINIX host has a real purpose, e.g., you can SSH to it from another machine on your network.

The same is true if you disable the running of the DHCP client at system initialization time and instead manually assign a static IP address (see boot(8) for more information). So if you know what the IP address will be and wish to assign a name to your MINIX host, enter the address/name pair into /etc/hosts (see hosts(5) for specific information about the format of that file).

For further information on post-installation network configuration see here.

See InstallingBinaryPackages on how to install prebuilt packages from the network or from the installation CD. This is one of the first things you should do because the system you get after finishing setup is a barebones system. Using pkgin, you can choose from a large number of packages to tailor the system to your requirements.

Always logging in as root is usually a bad idea, so it is highly recommended to set up at least one other user as soon as possible. For directions on how to do that please see: Managing User Accounts

rc.d scripts of additional services:

The PKGSRC OpenSSH package contains both the client (ssh) and the daemon (sshd). We recommend installing this, as it allows ssh access from another host, which improves greatly the user experience in the absence of X11.

If you installed MINIX in a virtual machine, please refer to the Virtualization chapter for your virtual machine monitor of this user guide for further instructions on how to enable network access to the MINIX guest.

To install, start, and automatically start sshd, do these commands, referring to rc.d scripts of additional services for explanation:

# pkgin update
# pkgin install openssh
# cp /usr/pkg/etc/rc.d/sshd /etc/rc.d/
# printf 'sshd=YES\n' >> /etc/rc.conf
# /etc/rc.d/sshd start

If you want to enable ssh login as root (dangerous), edit /usr/pkg/etc/ssh/sshd_config and change the line that reads
#PermitRootLogin prohibit-password
to
PermitRootLogin yes

A script is available to install about 700 commonly used packages, organized in three sets. To install them, type the following commands and answer Y each time you are asked about a set.

pkgin update
pkgin_sets

Note that you don't need to run pkgin update every time you run pkgin. Just before the first use.

MINIX 3 supports four virtual terminals. You can switch between them using ALT+F1 through ALT+F4. This could be useful, for example, if you type a command to install many packages and want to do something while it is installing. You can just switch to a different virtual terminal, log in there, and do other work.

Several keyboard layouts are available. These layouts are loaded from files called “keymaps.”

For example, here's how to enable the Swapped Caps & Ctrl U.S. keymap:

loadkeys /usr/lib/keymaps/us-swap.map

To make the keymap the default:

cp /usr/lib/keymaps/us-swap.map /etc/keymap

For details, see keymap(5). This contains the complete documentation on how to create and configure keymaps. The keymap source code is in /usr/src/drivers/tty/keymaps.

After installing MINIX, you can check the status of your system by running different tests.

To run the MINIX tests do the following:

# cd /usr/tests/minix-posix
# ./run

Warning: This test suite is extremely extensive, and may take up to several hours to complete, depending on your hardware. The usual run time on current computers (about 2GHz Intel CPUs) is about half an hour.

You might see some warnings, those are fine as long as the test prints “ok” at the end.

After all the tests have been run, a summary will be printed.

We have imported the KYUA test suites. At this time we have not yet spent much time trying to get all tests to pass. It is expected that some are marked as broken and/or failed.

Also, not everything which is tried is relevant on MINIX, for example we do not have quota support, which is why all the related tests fail.

Anyway, to see how much MINIX is NetBSD-compatible, you can run the kyua tests as follow:

# cd /usr/tests
# kyua test

To see the report, you can use one of the following commands:

# kyua report         # text-only report
# kyua report-html    # HTML report
# kyua report-tap     # TAP report

Note: The KYUA tests are not yet supported on MINIX/arm.

See TrackingCurrent.