Things to Remember in a New Installation

2017/05/20

When (re-)installing a new computing from scratch there is always a bunch of stuff I need to install. This is an attempt to provide a list of things to remember. The commands are executed on Linux Mint.

Shell

First, I need my dotfiles to get a familiar feeling. I manage these with rcm that have detailed instructions for installation. My central dotfiles folder is ~/Documents/dotfiles:

cd ~/Documents
git clone https://github.com/robertdj/dotfiles.git

rcm needs its own rc file and then it can take care of the rest:

ln -s ~/Documents/dotfiles/rcrc ~/.rcrc
rcup -v -t tmux -t linux -t computing

Secondly, I prefer to use ZSH instead of the usual BASH. 

sudo apt install zsh
chsh -s /bin/zsh
Log out for the change of shell to take effect.

As a plugin manager for ZSH I use the lightweight zgen.

Vim

Vim is my one and only editor. In a previous post I describe how to compile Vim from source. Some of my plugins require Vim to be compiled with Python (2 or 3): 

sudo apt install python-dev python3-dev

After a successful install, I need my plugins. I use the plugin manager vim-plug that has instructions on the GitHub page. I am a huge fan of the fuzzy finder fzf and the acompanying Vim plugin. Both are installed when running :PlugInstall in Vim, but fzf must be added to the PATH variable.

Misc

Statistics & numerical computing

My two main tools in this regard are R with RStudio and Julia.

sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev

Julia’s README lists a number of “Required Build Tools”, but it turns out that OpenSSL is missing. All in all the following should do the trick: 

sudo apt install gfortran perl curl wget cmake patch m4 gcc clang libssl-dev

Browser plugins

I use the following plugins in my browsers:

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