techtonik / workstation

The fastest way to get usable workstation out of a plain OS install

TL;DR

./ansible.sh

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Here I did experiments with different automation tools for speedy bootstrap of Linux workstation. Ansible scripts were an easy win, and I stuck with it. Chef scripts and notes are preserved in chef/ subdirectory. bin/ contains helpers that should be copied to $HOME/bin as-is.

Software shortlist

• git
  • git-extras
    • git pr
• mercurial
• vim
• micro
• WAD
• TODO: some commandline linkchecker
  • https://pypi.python.org/pypi/existence/0.2.6
    • patch to work with URLs
• ps_mem

# install globally into /usr/local/bin
# -O - get filename from URL
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pixelb/ps_mem/master/ps_mem.py && chmod +x ps_mem.py && sudo mv ps_mem.py /usr/local/bin/

Gateways

• 86.57.247.127

Goals

• gather scenarios on how to quickly prepare (development) environment for different tasks

• improve user experience for such scenarios

• collect list of those "different tasks"

Workstation

..is a box (deck) with some operating system and personal tools to do the job.

The basic stuff I expect to see on every Linux machine is listed in Shortlist

Some dependencies are non-crossplatorm. For example, on Windows I want vim replaced with Far Manager + Colorer.

Below are these requirements adapted for the clean installs of some operating systems.

Workstation: Linux, Fedora 17

• git

• hg

• vim

• google-chrome

Bootstraping workstations

• README.Ansible - ..Ansible
• README.Chef - ..Chef Solo on Linux

Chef Solo is a standalone tool of Chef framework, a limited alternative to full Chef client/server.

I use Ansible, because it is written in Python and doesn't run any services on my workstation.