[SLL] what do you do on new GNU/Linux development workstations?

[Adam Monsen]

Good idea, Jeremy! If you don't mind, I'd like to take your thread
("what do you do every time for new systems?") and morph it into one
specific to GNU/Linux development workstations.

I love setup and tools-related conversations since they often involve
excellent productivity hacks. One of my favorite talks at OSCON 2003
was "Inside ~damian/bin". Now there's a fellow (Damian Conway) who
spent a long time working on his toolkit.

I copied some stuff from your post and other replies.

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 7:26 AM, Jeremy C. Reed <reed at reedmedia.net> wrote:
>  So what do you commonly do when you first login to a system you will be
>  using (not temporarily)?

Get my Bash, Readline, Screen and Vim startup files in place:
  http://dotfiles.org/~meonkeys/.bashrc
  http://dotfiles.org/~meonkeys/.inputrc
  http://dotfiles.org/~meonkeys/.screenrc
  http://dotfiles.org/~meonkeys/.vimrc

Set up Bash programmable completion.

Set up SSH keys for public key passwordless authentication.

I usually also throw scripts in ~/bin to automate all sorts of boring
things like:
* eliminating spaces from filenames
* printing the full path for a relative filename
* find largest files/directories in a tree (although Baobab is awesome
for this if I can run GUI programs on the box)
* etc.

Install "tree" (displays files and directories as an ASCII tree).

If I'm going to be developing in Vim, I set up cvscommand, svncommand,
and vimoutliner plugins. One of these days I'll evolve to svk and/or
git.

Install info docs for many GNU utilities (usually just as I need them).

If I have full control over the box...
* update the system
* disable extraneous services running in /etc/init.d/, /etc/xinetd.d/, etc.
* check out ~/bin from my Subversion repository
* set up backups (I'm still learning how to do this effectively)
* set up ntpd
* set up sudo: add myself to the "wheel" group, then give this group
full sudo privs
* set up a decent default iptables firewall. Usually I only let in
SSH, then drop all other packets.

If it's going to be a full-on desktop with Xorg, I'll do quite a bit
more. Java development? Even more stuff. I guess I'll save all that
for another thread. :)

I feel obliged to also state goals for tools that I use. Thankfully, I
just wrote similar goals for my current project (
http://tinyurl.com/2dvzc3 ). My ideal development tools are:
* cross-platform
* feature-rich
* extensible
* stable
* low-overhead: memory and CPU requirements should be reasonable
* FLOSS

-- 
Adam Monsen