qol - Quality Of Life improvements

If you're like me, every once in a while you have to undergo the menial task of reinstalling the system from scratch on a new work laptop, personal desktop or whatever. While installing the OS itself should be relatively straightforward (I'm assuming a relatively standard Ubuntu distribution or one of its variations), a lot is left to do, such as installing basic packages such as vim, tmux and openssh-server, setting up a new fancy shell with zsh and its plugins, installing anaconda and creating standard virtual environments etc.

Here is where this set of scripts and resources comes in handy!

Overview

This repository consists of several (theoretically) idependent scripts which take care of different parts: installing base packages, setting up a powerful yet readable shell prompt, installing anaconda and creating standard environments and so on.

"But hey! How do I clone a repository if the system is brand new and I don't even have git installed?" - Everyone, panicking.

Don't panic, I got you covered: use the following code snippet to just install git and clone this repo. Come on, it's just one line, I'm pretty sure you can remember it :)

    wget git.io/hexe_kickstart -O kickstart-qol.sh 

Then, just make it executable, run it (you will be asked your password for sudo, since you still need to install stuff) et voilà.

Here is the code if you're that lazy:

    chmod +x kickstart-qol.sh && ./kickstart-qol.sh 

You now have a new folder repo in your home containing just this repo.

Now the real stuff begins.

System setup script

Inside folder setup-scripts you will find the script setup_ubuntu.sh which will begin the installation process for all components.

Just execute it with ./setup_ubuntu.sh and a menu will allow you to select which components you want to install.

Core

Include a shell script which installs most common packages such as git, tmux, google chrome etc.

Shell (zsh)

Install zsh and set it as default shell (might require logging back in/rebooting for changes to take place).

Moreover, configure it to use antigen to manage the various plugins (mainly the powerlevel9k theme for the oh-my-zsh bundle and the zsh-syntax-highlight plugin).

Since the powerlevel9k theme requires the installation of fonts with special glyphs which are not available normally (nerdfonts), also take care of properly installing them (also recreating font cache).

The effect of such changes is shown in the screenshot below (note: uses the color materialshell-dark color scheme, also included in this repository and installed by the terminal component.).

tl;dr

Here is how your prompt will look like after running this component of the setup:

Terminal emulator

tl;dr

Install xfce4-terminal and copy in the local configuration folder (the default location is ~/.local/share/xfce4/terminal/colorschemes) the two colorschemes included in this repository, materialshell-oceanic and materialshell-dark, from https://github.com/carloscuesta/materialshell.

vim

tl;dr

Install Vim and the Vundle plugin manager (from https://github.com/VundleVim/Vundle.vim) , plus create a symbolik link to the .vimrc file included in this repo in order to include many useful plugins in your configuration.

Desktop

tl;dr

Install packages suckless-tools (include the dmenu program), xcompmgr and docky.

Anaconda

tl;dr

Install the latest miniconda version and create two standard virtual environments (one for python 2.* and the other one for python 3.*) that can later be cloned.

Note: this component should be installed after the shell component has been configured, so that the correct .*rc is properly altered by the installation to include the path to anaconda binaries in the $PATH environment variable.

The virtual enviromnents include the following packages:

• numpy
• scikit-learn
• jupyter
• seaborn

Moreover, create an alias for jupyter notebook so that it can be accessed remotely.