I use OSX to consume content and Linux to create content. Or, rather, my wife screws up my Netflix preferences on OSX and I spend too much time fucking with syntax highlighting on Ubuntu. I recently bought a new Macbook Pro, and I’ve documented the steps to set up Ubuntu on a virtual machine. I’ll save the machine image so that I don’t actually have to go through these steps again; but it may be useful as a script, of sorts:

VM Fusion and Ubuntu

Download Ubuntu 12.04 from the Ubuntu website and follow these instructions to install the platform on OSX using VMware Fusion. You can use it immediately with the Electronic Software Download. If you have retina display, then you’ll have to turn off the option for Accelerate 3D Graphics found in Virtual Machine > Settings > Display. Don’t enable the option to use the full resolution for retina display in that menu. Instead, set the screen resolution on the OSX side: System Preferences > Display.

Folder sharing

I keep everything on Dropbox, including code and configurations. I don’t want to duplicate storage on my computer, so I share the OSX-side Dropbox folder with the VM. Go to Virtual Machine > Settings > Sharing and add the Dropbox folder. The shared folder will show up on the virtual machine in the /mnt/hgfs/ directory. I like to have it up-front, in my home folder, so I symlinked it from within the home directory:

sudo ln -s /mnt/hgfs/Dropbox Dropbox

Depending on what version of Ubuntu and VMware you download, it may not be so easy to share folders across platforms. It’s worth struggling through, however, so that you don’t waste valuable disk space with duplicated files (and risk strange overwrites).

I also removed a bunch of the default folders:

rm -rf Documents/ Music/ Pictures/ Public/ Templates/ Videos/ examples.desktop 

Configuration files

I keep all of my configuration and credential files within Dropbox/settings. For example, I keep a global bash profile, unhidden, in the settings directory, which I symlink into my home directory on the VM:

sudo ln -s Dropbox/settings/ssh/ .ssh
sudo ln -s Dropbox/settings/starcluster/ .starcluster
sudo ln -s Dropbox/settings/emacs.d/ .emacs.d
sudo ln -s Dropbox/settings/s3cfg .s3cfg
sudo ln -s Dropbox/settings/bashrc .bashrc

You may have to make minor adjustments to this step. You may, for example, have to remove the default .bashrc file before symlinking your custom bash script. I forked my Emacs configuration from here. Within .ssh/, I keep my AWS keypairs and Google Earth Engine credentials, like .ssh/ee-privatekey.p12. This way, if I lose my computer, I’ll have all the customizations backed up on Dropbox.

Install Yakuake and Emacs 24

I like Yakuake to work at the command line. It looks great and it’s easy to use. Install it and then configure the layout, removing all animation (for the love):

sudo apt-get install yakuake
yakuake

Then install Emacs, along with some modes and programs that you’ll need for statistics work:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cassou/emacs
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install emacs24 emacs24-el emacs24-common-non-dfsg
sudo apt-get install r-base-core ess clojure git s3cmd

The result will look like this:

Install Java and Leiningen

Install the JVM for Clojure, maybe multiple versions depending on the projects you require:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre openjdk-6-jre

Then Leiningen for easy use of Clojure.

cd /tmp
sudo wget https://raw.github.com/technomancy/leiningen/preview/bin/lein
sudo mv lein /usr/bin/lein
sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/lein
lein -v

Also, I like working with the nrepl package for Emacs, so hit M-x package-list-packages in Emacs and make sure it’s installed. You can enter a REPL, then, by just hitting M-x nrepl-jack-in from within a Clojure buffer.

Install elastic-mapreduce

I use elastic-mapreduce for creating, describing and terminating Job Flows using Amazon Elastic MapReduce. Follow these instructions. If you already have your credentials.json file, then it’s pretty simple. First grab Ruby and wget:

sudo apt-get install ruby-full wget

Then get the command line interface:

mkdir elastic-mapreduce-cli
wget http://elasticmapreduce.s3.amazonaws.com/elastic-mapreduce-ruby.zip
unzip elastic-mapreduce-ruby.zip -d elastic-mapreduce-cli

Put your credentials.json file in the elastic-mapreduce-cli directory. And ensure that the following is in your .bashrc file.

export PATH=$PATH:~/elastic-mapreduce-cli/elastic-mapreduce-ruby

Install StarCluster

StarCluster is an open source project to build, configure, and manage clusters of virtual machines on Amazon’s EC2 cloud. We use it to launch simple, accessible jobs in Python, R, or Stata if Hadoop seems excessive.

sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
sudo easy_install StarCluster

The configuration files are located in ~/.starcluster, but really reside on Dropbox, as described above.

Configure git

For coloring and other handy stuff:

git config --global color.branch auto
git config --global color.diff auto
git config --global color.interactive auto
git config --global color.status auto

Install Jekyll

In a sort of meta, final step, you should install Jekyll – which is what I used to generate this site.

git clone git://github.com/rubygems/rubygems.git
cd rubygems
ruby setup.rb
sudo gem1.8 install jekyll
sudo gem1.8 install rdiscount
sudo easy_install Pygments
sudo apt-get install markdown

Oh and maybe MongoDB:

sudo apt-get install mongodb