Anarres is a collection of Ansible roles and playbooks, and aims at automating (as much as possible) the setup of:
- bare metal GNU/Linux workstations;
- virtual GNU/Linux machines, with the help of VirtualBox and Vagrant.
This project started as a way of tracking all the packages and libraries I install on my Arch Linux hosts for daily and occasional usage:
- a desktop environment,
- some text editors,
- my dotfiles,
- a whole bunch of programming languages, interpreters, libraries, and debugging symbols,
- network, filesystem and performance utilities,
- multimedia players and editing software,
- etc.
It eventually turned into an experiment to see how much of a desktop setup could be automated, which proved to be extremely useful to spin development GNU/Linux virtual machines while working on a Windows workstation.