tooling/setup.org

Linux Mint Setup

• Setup home directory structure
• Configure apt to use a local mirror
• Install base packages
• Restore ssh keys and dotfiles
  • Obtain ssh key from bitwarden
  • Clone and restore dotfiles
• Optional configuration
  • Optional - Cloud provider tools
  • Optional - Nodejs dev tooling
  • Optional - Install hardware drivers
  • Optional - Setup humacs editor
  • Optional - Setup mutt mail client
  • Optional - Install rust
  • Optional - Bluetooth manual pairing

This guide will walk through how I setup fresh installations of POP!_OS. Pop!_OS is a free and open-source Linux distribution, based upon Ubuntu, and featuring a customized GNOME desktop environment known as COSMIC. The distribution is developed by American Linux computer manufacturer System76. Pop!_OS is primarily built to be bundled with the computers built by System76, but can also be downloaded and installed on most computers.

Pop!_OS provides full out-of-the-box support for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. It is regarded as an easy distribution to set up for gaming, mainly due to its built-in GPU support. Pop!_OS provides default disk encryption, streamlined window and workspace management, keyboard shortcuts for navigation as well as built-in power management profiles.

I use POP!_OS as my daily driver operating system on a variety of different machines. The intent of this guide is to make it easy for me to get back up and running quickly whenver I do a fresh installation.

Setup home directory structure

After installing the distribution I ensure the following directories are present in my home folder as they are relied on by other automated steps in this setup process:

# Ensure we are in our home folder and create required directories
cd ~/ && mkdir Documents Downloads

Configure apt to use a local mirror

To speed up how quickly our system can install new or updated packages we should tell apt to use a mirror here in New Zealand.

# Backup our apt sources configuration before we make changes
sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list.bak

# Replace packages repo with local
sudo sed -i 's|https://packages.linuxmint.com|http://ucmirror.canterbury.ac.nz/linux/mint/packages|g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list

# Replace base repo with local
sudo sed -i 's|https://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu|http://ucmirror.canterbury.ac.nz/ubuntu|g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list

Install base packages

Now that we have our apt package manager configured let's install the standard packages we use.

sudo apt install --yes htop screenfetch git curl wget xclip emacs xterm xtermcontrol jq tmux tmate apt-transport-https dict

For working with container images locally outside of kubernetes clusters we use podman so that we can avoid the security problems of a standard docker daemon. Follow the steps below to install podman:

# Add the repositories to our apt sources
echo "deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/xUbuntu_20.04/ /" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devel:kubic:libcontainers:stable.list

# Add the repository key
curl -L "https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/kubic:/libcontainers:/stable/xUbuntu_20.04/Release.key" | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt update && sudo apt --yes install podman

When working with kubernetes applications we often use helm, unfortunately we need an extra apt repository for this so let's add that now and install.

curl https://baltocdn.com/helm/signing.asc | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://baltocdn.com/helm/stable/debian/ all main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/helm-stable-debian.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt install -y helm

Finally, we should upgrade the python package manger pip that we installed, before using it to install podman-compose.

sudo pip install --upgrade pip && sudo pip3 install podman-compose

For managing secrets we use bitwarden which provides a great cli utility. Additionally in our bashrc file included in this repository there are a number of helper functions to make working with bw easier.

# Download the latest release
wget "https://vault.bitwarden.com/download/?app=cli&platform=linux" --output-document "bw.zip"

# Unzip and install the latest release
unzip "bw.zip" && sudo install "bw" "/usr/local/bin" && rm "bw" "bw.zip"

# Login to bitwarden
bw login mail@jamesblair.net

For ad-hoc system administration we use ansible. We install ansible via pip3 to ensure any modules or additional packages required at a later date can be easily managed.

For significant ansible or python projects a virtual environment for python is suggested to keep project packages separate from system python packages.

pip3 install ansible

Restore ssh keys and dotfiles

I make extensive use of .dotfiles to further customise my environment. The script below restores my versions of key dotfiles automatically.

Obtain ssh key from bitwarden

In order to be able to clone the repository in the next step we need to obtain our ssh keys from bitwarden. Given we have installed the bitwarden cli we can mostly automte this process minus the initial login to bitwarden.

# Ensure we have an ssh-agent running
eval `ssh-agent`

# Generate a new blank key to overwrite
ssh-keygen -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/james -q -P ""

# Ensure we have an active bitwarden session
export BW_SESSION=$(bw unlock --raw > ~/.bw_session && cat ~/.bw_session)

# Export both keys
export key=$(bw get item desktop --pretty | grep notes)

# Extract private key
export private=${key:12}
export private=${private/END RSA*/END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----}
echo $private | awk '{gsub(/\\n/,"\n")}1' > ~/.ssh/james

# Extract public key
export public=${key/*ssh-rsa/ssh-rsa} && echo ${public::-2} | awk '{gsub(/\\n/,"\n")}1' > ~/.ssh/james.pub

Clone and restore dotfiles

Once our keys are available to us we can clone down our dotfiles and get back to our comfortable normal terminal environment.

# Clone down this repository
git clone https://jmhbnz@gitea.jamma.life/jmhbnz/tooling.git ~/Documents/tooling/

# Restore all dotfiles
cp ~/Documents/tooling/.* ~/

# Reload bashrc with updated version
source ~/.bashrc

Optional configuration

Optional - Cloud provider tools

Currently kubectl is packaged separately to gcloud and other cloud provider tools so let's install that first.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg

echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.kubernetes.io/ kubernetes-xenial main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y kubectl

For working with google cloud platform we use the GCP SDK, which provides our cli tools.

# Download the sdk archive
curl -o gcpsdk.tar -O https://dl.google.com/dl/cloudsdk/channels/rapid/downloads/google-cloud-sdk-375.0.0-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

# Extract to a folder in path then remove archive
sudo tar xvf gcpsdk.tar -C /usr/local/ && rm gcpsdk.tar

# Correct folder permissions
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /usr/local/google-cloud-sdk

# Run the install script
/usr/local/google-cloud-sdk/install.sh

For working with Amazon Web Services we need the AWS CLI.

# Download the binary
cd ~/Downloads/
curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"

# Install
unzip awscliv2.zip
sudo ./aws/install

# Clean up
rm -rf ~/Downloads/aws*

Optional - Nodejs dev tooling

Some of my project work involves working with nodejs and for package management namely we sometimes use node package manager. The code below installs node 16.x, which is the latest stable release as of <2022-09-16 Fri>.

# Curl down the shell script for adding version 16 of nodejs to apt
sudo curl  -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo bash -

# Install the nodejs package via apt
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

# Install yarn dependency manager
sudo npm install --global yarn

Optional - Install hardware drivers

Optional - Setup humacs editor

An integral part of our pair development workflow is humacs. Below are the instructions to set this up.

# Clone down humac[s
git clone --recursive https://github.com/jmhbnz/humacs /home/$USER/Downloads/

# Need to ensure environment variables are set for load path
export EMACSLOADPATH=/home/$USER/Downloads/humacs

Optional - Setup mutt mail client

For reading email we ideally use a cli based client for fast searching and lightweight mail reading.

The mutt mail client fills these roles well for imap mailboxes.

The first step to setup mutt is to ensure it is installed.

sudo apt-get install -y mutt urlscan

After installing mutt we then need to create configuration directories and files.

mkdir -p ~/.mutt/cache/headers
mkdir ~/.mutt/cache/bodies
touch ~/.mutt/certificates

One configuration folders and files exist we just need to populate our user mutt configuration file with a configuration for our particular mail provider.

The example provided in this repository utilises the bitwarden cli utility for secrets to ensure these are securely gathered at runtime and not stored in the file.

Optional - Install rust

I've been tinkering with learning the Rust programming language lately, to set that up follow these steps:

# Ensure pre-requisites are installed
sudo apt install curl build-essential gcc make -y

# Install rust via setup script
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

Once installed you can check if the rust compiler is installed with the code block below:

rustc -V && cargo -V

Optional - Bluetooth manual pairing

Using linux across all my devices has been pretty smooth however I have one annoyance with bluetooth on my HP Envy x360 ultrabook (model 13-ag0015AU). On that device I can't pair my Logitech k380 keyboard with the user interface, via either blueberry or blueman.

To work around this I found some excellent documentation on the Arch Linux wiki for manually pairing with bluetoothctl.

The steps I follow to manually pair are:

# Enter bluetoothctl interactive prompt
bluetoothctl

# Ensure laptop can pair
pairable on

# Scan for devices
scan on

# Pair with the keyboard
pair 34:88:5D:D6:A6:2B

# Trust the keyboard
trust 34:88:5D:D6:A6:2B

# Connect to the keyboard
connect 34:88:5D:D6:A6:2B