How to Recreate My Linux Desktop

gistfile1.md

• Install Ubuntu

  This isn't an endorsement of all of Canonical's design decisions, nor their community relations approach, but rather a recognition that as much as I'd like to like Fedora, it's just that much more difficult to use that I've never been able to make the jump. SuSE, meanwhile, lacks the same visibility with third party packagers, so it's out. I even contemplated an OS X switch recently, but I just can't justify replacing the hardware I have with Apple kit, which I'd have to do (I looked into the Hackintosh compatibility: no joy).

  So Ubuntu remains the best option for me. Your mileage may vary, obviously.

• Install Dropbox

  Everything important to me is in Dropbox. Files, music and movies, yes, but also my emacs config, my bash aliases, my non-packaged applications - everything. So it's the first thing I install. Because it would take days to reload everything from the network, however, I usually manually rsync the Dropbox directory to an external hard drive, then reverse the process on the fresh install. Like so:

  rsync -rv /laptop /harddrive

  rsync -rv /harddrive /laptop

  Once I've reloaded the Dropbox dir, I do the following from my home directory:

  ln -s ~/Dropbox/emacs emacs

  ln -s ~/Dropbox/.emacs .emacs

  ln -s ~/Dropbox/.bash_aliases .bash_aliases

  This symlinks my bash_aliases and emacs config into place, such that the terminal and emacs both work as I expect them to when I fire them up.

• Uninstall Evolution and Transmission

  Evolution comes off because I don't use a local email client, and Transmission because it just hasn't worked that well for me.

  sudo apt-get remove evolution transmission-gtk

• Install Chromium, Deluge, emacs, restricted-extras, Samba, ttf-droid, R, VLC

Chromium (dev channel), Deluge, emacs, and VLC are all my preferred applications, Git, R, restricted-extras and Samba necessary infrastructure, and ttf-droid brings the fonts I use.

 `sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/dev
 sudo apt-get update
 sudo apt-get install chromium-browser deluge-gtk emacs git r-base samba ttf-droid ubuntu-restricted-extras vlc`

• Update the System Fonts

  In Appearance:Fonts, I switch the system fonts over to Droid Sans and Droid Sans Mono.

• Set up Tomboy Sync

  Under Tomboy:Preference:Synchronization, I connect this Tomboy instance with the synced directory from other machines located in my Dropbox folder.

• Set up my AWS Micro-Instance VPN Connection

  See here for AWS details and the comment here for Ubuntu client config.

• Update my SSH Certs

  I need to update my ssh key for login-less ssh access and for GitHub. The latter is easy, the former I do as follows:

  ssh-keygen

  ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub hostname

• Add additional languages as necessary

Depending on the machine config, I may then add things like Hadoop (using Cloudera's distribution)