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Installation

When you get a new computer, or decide to do spring cleaning on a current computer and wipe-reinstall, follow these instructions. You started recording this in your essentials repo, but will be reproduced here for wider exposure.

The next time you wipe your hard drive or decide to upgrade and need to start from scratch, this will help you out tremendously. Most of the re-installation work is in setting up your dev environment, including editors and your Python environment. For Mac installs, you're mostly only going to care about zshrc, VSCode settings, and Anaconda/python, which currently you'll need to copy over yourself.

Install History

Log of the installations you've done using this package. For completeness, the partial Mac installs are also listed below, even though they don't use the entirety of this repository and are not the focus of tracking installations.

  • 2021-06-07: Duo Security Macbook
  • 2020-12-29: ARES-3 (Linux Mint 19 desktop) reinstall
  • 2020-08-22: ARES-4m (Linux Mint 20 laptop)
  • 2020-07-19: ARES-4 (Windows 10 + Windows Subsystem for Linux)
  • 2019-02-19: ARES-3 (Linux Mint 19 desktop)
  • 2019-01-15: White Ops Macbook
  • 2017-12-17: ARES-2m (Linux Mint 18 laptop)
  • 2017-10-16: Gartner Macbook
  • 2016-05-03: ARES-2 (Ubuntu 16 laptop)

Previous installations and refreshes of Ubuntu and Linux Mint were not recorded at the time, so the log is only complete for recent dates. For instance, I had repairs done on the ARES-2* laptop in July 2014, and likely did a wipe-and-replace on the harddrive around that time.

Editors

You primarily use VSCode for your editing purposes. In the past, you've also used domain-specific editors (e.g. IntelliJ) when necessary. Your VSCode configurations are saved and propagated in your setup.py script, including your extension list. Getting that extension list to show up automatically is a little finicky, so you've copied it into the workspace file for your essentials to get that process to bootstrap your installation. You can expand setup.py to automatically install those extensions for you, after getting the code CLI set up following installation.

For quick edits, git messages, and other small needs, you use vim. Likewise, your Vim configuration is set up using your bootstrap script. You haven't changed it in a while, so in the future you may want to think about to what extent it is working for you (if at all). For now, the persistence is there just in case, but you are using Vim less and less at this point.

Things to look into

For Linux Mint, it would be really nice if our bootstrapping script also set up my various preferences so that I wouldn't need to do a bunch of manual tasks after, like setting the system Terminal shortcut or changing the calendar date format.

Include more things into the bootstrap script. Could we clone repos from there? Could we install additional packages? Could we set up zsh and Timeular and git and everything else from that? We possibly would want to convert it back to a shell script, otherwise it would be a ton of additional code for not much gain.