Instead of continuously plugging my nice big monitor and mechanical keyboard into my work Macbook Pro, I decided to setup a Linux VM on my home desktop so I could do the same things I can do on the Mac. As most of the things I work with are under version control, it should be relatively simple to switch between machines.
The main things I needed were:
- Ruby on Rails with Postgresql
- Latex
- Python 3 and IDLE, along with some of the graphics libraries
I usually use Ubuntu, but for a change I decided to check out Linux Mint, a very popular variant.
Ruby on Rails
Based on a quick read of various blog posts, rbenv seems to be the tool more people now use to manage their ruby versions, so that’s what I decided to go with. ruby-build is also necessary to actually install ruby versions easily. Both repos and their instructions can be found on github.
Bundler is used to manage rubygems. See more at http://bundler.io/
It’s really easy to install. Just run gem install bundler
Checkout the Rails app then run bundle install
Postgresql
To install Postgresql, I followed the instructions from their download page for Ubuntu. Linux Mint Rebecca is based on Trusty Tahr (Ubuntu 14.04), so I used that. It was also necessary to install the postgresql-server-dev-9.4 package as the pg gem needs it.
To allow my user to login with psql and do useful things, it was also necessary to create a postgres role with create db rights for my OS username.
This was easy. Install texlive from the package manager. I had a missing package later on but a quick Google search told me what to install. Can’t remember the package name.
Python 3
sudo apt-get install python3-dev sudo apt-get install python3-pip sudo pip3 install PILLOW sudo apt-get install idle-python3.4
