Installation

Ideas how to setup a work laptop.

Hardware

I have bought a Dell Inspiron 17R.

The laptop sports an Qualcomm Atheros Wireless Network adaptor as seen by the output of the following command.

lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net

=output=

02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565 / AR9565 Wireless Network Adapter [168c:0036] (rev 01)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:020c]

In order to retrieve correct drivers follow the instructions on this blog post.

Software

Operating System

The operating system will be base upon Ubuntu because

1. provisioning of Linux machines is superior.
2. I am familiar with Ubuntu.

I will opt for a Long Term Support, which means I will be settling for 12.04.

git

We will be using the git version control system to retrieve configurations.

Shell

I grew fond of the fish shell. It can be installed from their PPA. To set it as the default shell use chsh.

Editor

Without going into a religous war my editor of choice is Emacs. The latest version is 24. It can be installed from an PPA provided by Damien Cassou.

Emacs should be configured by cloning .emacs.d.

Window Manager

i3 is the window manager I will be using. It can be configured by cloning .i3

Provisioning

The minimal setup to provision a laptop is described below.

Install git

git is used to retrieve the repository that contains cookbooks that will be used to provision the laptop. You can get it from the package manager with the following command

sudo apt-get install git.

Register ssh key

GitHub hosts the repository that is used. In order to have write access to the cookbooks repositories it is necessary to register an ssh key.

You can find details in the documentation.

Clone Repository

This repository needs to be cloned in order to correctly acquire the cookbooks. The following sequence of commands will create a scratch directory, clone the repository and retrieve all submodules.

mkdir ~/scratch
cd ~/scratch
git clone git@github.com:dvb-industries/installation.git
cd installation
git submodule update --init --recursive

Chef Solo

We will rely on Chef to provision the laptop. Because we do not want to depend on Chef Server we will use chef-solo.

Below is commands will add install chef on the laptop.

The installation procedure depends on curl so we need to install that.

sudo apt-get install curl

curl -L https://www.opscode.com/chef/install.sh | sudo bash

Run Chef Solo

To let chef provision execute the following command

sudo chef-solo -c provision.rb -j provision.json