Mint 20 initial manual setup - lmmx/devnotes GitHub Wiki

Here's everything I did after installing Linux Mint 20 to customise to my liking (in order)

  • Install git, xclip, tmux, parcellite, vim
sudo apt install git-all xclip tmux parcellite hub

Mint theme

  • Menu ⇢ Themes: Window borders = "Mint-X", Icons = "Mint-Y", Controls = "Mint-Y"

Terminal

  • Change the background colour to black
  • Untick "show menubar by default in new terminals" in preferences

Parcellite

  • Run on the command line as parcellite & (after restart it will launch at startup by default)
  • Right click the clipboard icon that appears in the corner panel, in Preferences tick the top 3:
    • Use Copy (Ctrl-C)
    • Use Primary (Selection)
    • Synchronize clipboards
  • (Now selected text will be copied to the clipboard: what else do you use select for anyway?)

Firefox settings

  • Change default search engine to DDG (type "search engine" in the search bar)
  • Type "home" in the search bar and
    • Untick home page junk (just show search bar), under "Firefox home content" untick:
      • "Top sites"
      • "Recommended by Pocket"
      • "Highlights"
    • Unset home page from the Linux Mint site
      • Set both "Homepage and new windows" & "New tabs" to the option "Firefox Home"
  • Untick "Ctrl + Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order" (type "Tab" in search bar)
  • Add uBlock Origin

Git

  • Regenerate SSH keys

    • For GitHub in particular that'd be this page, the important commands are

      ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "[email protected]"
eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
xclip -selection clipboard < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

    • For macOS this is the same but cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub | pbcopy

  • Then paste into GitHub: "New SSH key" named after your new OS (e.g. "Mint20") https://github.com/settings/keys

Also set up your details

git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git config --global user.email "Your Name"

Dotfiles

Git clone your git-versioned dotfiles repo (either backed up from previous OS or on another machine) and unpack the particular files to its rightful place (I do not recommend versioning the live files, just use the git repo for backups)

  • Obviously first backup the config file in case there are any OS upgrade-specific lines in the .bashrc that you'll overwrite
  • You want to be careful to retain all proper file permissions, so I recommend duplicating your config files and catting over them rather than mving them away and cping in the git repo ones
    • For the extension files it doesn't matter as these are just sourced indirectly
    • .tmux.conf and .vimrc do not exist upon first installation
cd
git clone [email protected]:lmmx/dotfiles.git dotfiles_git
cd dotfiles_git
cp ~/.bashrc ~/.bashrc_SYSTEM_DEFAULT
cat .bashrc > ~/.bashrc
mkdir -p ~/dotfiles/bashrc # Make a folder for the bashrc extension files
cp bashrc/bashrc_* ~/dotfiles/bashrc/
for f in .vimrc .tmux.conf; do cp $f ~/$f; done

Conda

  • Go here and wget the latest version of miniconda into your ~/Downloads then run the shell script installer with bash
  • I suggest doing this after setting up your bashrc (so it writes to your bashrc file after you change it)
  • Let the installer initialise conda but then don't autoactivate the base env
    • conda config --set auto_activate_base false

vimcat

Stick the binary in your path from the repo

mkdir -p ~/opt/bin
cd ~/opt
git clone [email protected]:lmmx/vimcat.git
ln -s ~/opt/vimcat/vimcat ~/opt/bin/vimcat

devnotes

How could I forget devnotes:

cd
mkdir ~/dev
cd dev
git clone [email protected]:lmmx/devnotes.wiki.git

vim

If there is any error raised about the plugin system, just comment out the plugins you don't want to use initially and set these up at a later date, just keep your main config for now.

Terminal

To dump a terminal colour scheme to file run

dconf dump /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/ > gnome-terminal-profiles.dconf

Update - this file is now included in the dotfiles repo

on the source system (your old OS/installation)

e.g.

[:b1dcc9dd-5262-4d8d-a863-c897e6d979b9]
foreground-color='rgb(247,247,247)'
palette=['rgb(0,0,0)', 'rgb(234,0,0)', 'rgb(30,183,30)', 'rgb(255,167,81)', 'rgb(160,71,255)', 'rgb(209,27,209)', 'rgb(62,216,216)', 'rgb(170,170,170)', 'rgb(85,85,85)', 'rgb(255,85,85)', 'rgb(85,255,85)', 'rgb(187,152,29)', 'rgb(92,92,250)', 'rgb(255,85,255)', 'rgb(85,255,255)', 'rgb(255,255,255)']
bold-is-bright=true
default-size-rows=30
default-size-columns=90
use-transparent-background=false
use-theme-colors=false
use-theme-transparency=false
background-color='rgb(0,0,0)'
background-transparency-percent=21

On the new destination system run:

dconf load /org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/ < gnome-terminal-profiles.dconf

which will retrieve the settings for a custom colour palette in gnome-terminal

LaTeX

To install TeXLive (via)

sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-base texlive-fonts-recommended texlive-fonts-extra texlive-latex-extra