Ubuntu Linux® For Dummies®

Chapter 23. Almost Ten System‐Administration Functions

In This Chapter

• Obtaining updates and new software

• Keeping an eye on system logs

• Adding, deleting, and modifying user accounts

• Setting your computer's time and date

• Viewing hardware resources

• Monitoring your system

• Starting and stopping system services

• Power management

Sure, you didn't sign up to be a system administrator when you decided to use an Ubuntu computer. Even though system administrators lead lives of excitement and get paid huge salaries — not!! — that profession is not for everyone.

But anyone who owns and uses a computer is by default a sysadmin. System administration is actually very easy. You need to perform several simple tasks and perform them regularly, and you're a sysadmin.

Being a professional system administrator is basically like being the sysadmin of your own computer. The primary difference is that you perform system‐administrator tasks for others as well as for yourself. You also have to know a wider range of tasks.

This chapter describes the most common, and also most important, system‐administrator tasks. Those jobs are pretty basic, if not simple. The easy part is learning what they are. The hard part is regularly doing the jobs.

Updating Debian Software Packages

Ubuntu maintains repositories that let you update your Ubuntu computer with the software. In the bad old days, you had to manually find, download, and install updated software; in the bad, really old days, you had to find, download, and recompile the ...