Personal Development Environment Notes
This page was updated on 07/06/2022.
For reference, I’m currently using an Intel NUC10i7FNH with 32 GB of RAM.
Setting up an Ubuntu Desktop 20.04 install
- When installing Ubuntu on a machine that uses Secure Boot, do not skip the key enrolment step on the initial reboot. I have accidentally pressed Continue without completing this step far too many times.
- After going through the welcome screen bumf, I tend to run the Software Updater and go through Settings (I am cursed with being incapable of using any new thing unless I’ve thoroughly scoured its options and settings).
- Most of my setup is handled by my Ansible gubbins, but I haven’t quite automated everything:
- Fix a bug in the Dash to Dock Gnome Shell extension that causes icons to take ages to update when you start with an empty dock by manually applying a fix available on GitHub to .
- In Firefox: install the 1Password extension, change the default search engine to DuckDuckGo, and hide all the junk from the new tab screen. I also sign in to my Firefox account to get my bookmarks and whatnot.
- To be able to use Terraform secrets, find and copy over any existing GnuPG bits-and-pieces (as far as I can tell, all you need is pubring.gpg, secring.gpg, and trustdb.gpg).
- Set the terminal font to Iosevka Term (which should be already installed by the provisioning Ansible playbook).
- Install JetBrains Toolbox and use it to install GoLand and PhpStorm (see also my PhpStorm notes).
- Install Steam.
- Connect to any network drives.
- Set up Livepatch, Syncthing, and Obsidian.
- Set up some Windows 10 VMs in VirtualBox for cross-browser testing and light Visual Studio usage.
- Remember to update the hosts file () to access websites and other network services on the host.
- While I’ve got a valid Windows 10 licence kicking about, Microsoft provide evaluation development environment virtual machines that are perfect for how often I need to use Windows. (Microsoft also provide virtual machines for testing websites in Internet Explorer 11 and Edge Legacy.)