Most of the files in this repo are .rc files, intended to be symlinked (or hardlinked or copied over, I guess). This file, ofc, is not such. Also I've had other text files in this repo in the past.

This file contains my notes to myself for getting a new linux shell up to some degree of usability as fast as possible. It doesn't include plans to get a Linux desktop environment usable, which I haven't done for a long time. Though if you're reading this and you want my opinion, my opinion is XFCE or LXDE.

Apt packages

As a first step, let's install some packages from apt

sudo apt-get install                      \
  tree git bash-completion man-db         \
  python3 python3-pip python-is-python3   \
  vim vim-doc                             \
  gcc g++ build-essential                 \
  yt-dlp youtubedl-gui                    \
  openssh-client jq unzip                 \
  imagemagick netpbm libtiff-tools entr   \
  postgresql postgresql-doc               \
  audacious

### obsolete
# sudo apt-get install python2.7 python-pip 

Bootstrapping the dotfiles repo

Then, set up the .ssh directory manually:

• mkdir ~/.ssh
• set up a keypair for main SSH-to-Github identity
  • the last time I was doing this I copied a keypair from my previous system
  • but usually I would ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "comment here"
    • for a comment I use ${my username} / ${which service (eg github)} / ${name of machine}
    • and then I'd need to upload to github
• manually copy the sshconfig into ~/.ssh/config

The purpose of the above is to allow git cloning, including git cloning this very repo.

I assume it has been cloned to ~/wrks/dotfiles

Binding dotfiles.

THEN we can link up all the relevant dotfiles.

Note that I'm copying old files to ~/nonconfigs first. Most of them won't exist and won't need copying, of course, so those mv commands will fail, which is fine. Anyway, the point of this is to be able to diff them afterward, to look for stuff that might have been useful in the original, and not included in my dotfiles repo. Once that's done, delete the ~/nonconfigs directory and its contents.

mkdir ~/nonconfigs

mv ~/.ssh/config ~/nonconfigs/sshconfig
ln -s ~/wrks/dotfiles/sshconfig ~/.ssh/config

mv ~/.bashrc ~/nonconfigs/
ln -s ~/wrks/dotfiles/bashrc ~/.bashrc

mv ~/.bash_profile ~/nonconfigs/
ln -s ~/wrks/dotfiles/bash_profile ~/.bash_profile

mv ~/.gitconfig ~/nonconfigs/
ln -s ~/wrks/dotfiles/gitconfig ~/.gitconfig

mv ~/.vimrc ~/nonconfigs/
ln -s ~/wrks/dotfiles/vimrc ~/.vimrc

mv ~/.npmrc ~/nonconfigs/
ln -s ~/wrks/dotfiles/npmrc ~/.npmrc

mv ~/.yarnrc ~/nonconfigs/
ln -s ~/wrks/dotfiles/yarnrc ~/.yarnrc

mv ~/.psqlrc ~/nonconfigs/
ln -s ~/wrks/dotfiles/psqlrc ~/.psqlrc

Setting up JS tools

First install nvm

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.7/install.sh | bash

Then install a recent nodejs

nvm install --lts --latest-npm

I'd like to install yarn as well. I previously used an install script (curl -o- -L https://yarnpkg.com/install.sh | bash), and there are complicated options for apt-installing (note that the Ubuntu package for yarn is not the right thing).

npm install --global yarn

Also I'd like yarn to have bash-completion, which I'm getting from https://github.com/dsifford/yarn-completion

mkdir -p "${BASH_COMPLETION_USER_DIR:-${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/bash-completion}/completions/"
curl -o "${BASH_COMPLETION_USER_DIR:-${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/bash-completion}/completions/yarn" \
	https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dsifford/yarn-completion/master/yarn-completion.bash

obsolete

I used to want to tweak yarn a bit, but I think it's taken care of in the .yarnrc above?

yarn config set init-version '0.1.0' yarn config set init-private true yarn config set init-license "UNLICENSED"

Are there other packages I should want to install globally?

npm install -g nodemon

Postgres Setup hints

Wanna use postgres? After installing, remember to

• create a role in the DB for myself, probably like this:
  • sudo su postgres -c 'createuser jholman --superuser'
• optionally create a self-named DB to make psql easier
  • createdb jholman
• fiddle with pg_hba.conf as necessary
  • maybe add "local all all trust" if you wanna let all users log in as anyone (via unix sockets)
  • but then again, it already has "local all all peer", which is enough for jholman to log in as jholman