This page contains a few starting tips/pointers to do when you first get your new VPS. We've split it up according to our two main distro groups. Please note all steps are optional, just a set of 'guidelines' as it were.

• Check your installed yum packages, remove whatever you don't need (reduce bloat!)

  yum list installed

  yum remove <package name>

• Run a full yum update

  yum update

• Install aptitude:

apt-get install aptitude

• Check your installed packages; remove whatever you don't need (reduce bloat!). aptitude automatically removes orphaned dependencies, so no need for an apt-get autoremove afterwards. You can replace remove with purge to also remove configuration files from packages while removing them if you don't need them.

aptitude search '~i'

aptitude remove package [package [...]]

• Update the package lists:

aptitude update

• Upgrade any old packages:

aptitude upgrade

• Check your installed packages, remove whatever you don't need (will probably not be needed on Arch)

• pacman -Qqe

  pacman -R <package name>

• Enable the VPS repository by adding

  [glibc-vps]
  Server = http://dev.archlinux.org/~ibiru/openvz/glibc-vps/$arch

  above [core] in /etc/pacman.conf. Until you have upgraded pacman, the $arch variable must be interpolated manually.

• Run a full update

  pacman -Syu

• You will most likely have to select a server in /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.conf remove the hash(#) before five of the Belgium links. Then do an update

  pacman -Syu

Edit /etc/make.conf, customising whatever you need, e.g. ACCEPT_KEYWORDS, CFLAGS, USE, MAKEOPTS, etc.

nano /etc/make.conf

Pull in the latest portage tree.

emerge --sync

Read the news.

eselect news read all

Update portage.

emerge -1 portage

Edit /etc/locale.gen and add locales so that you don't waste CPU time generating hundreds of useless locales. For example,

en_AU.UTF-8 UTF-8

Then, either just update,

emerge -DavuN world

or reinstall everything if you customised things like 'CFLAGS'.

emerge -eav world