Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac • Hacker News Board

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#51

Post by joeblau » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 8:03 PM UTC

Last year I was thinking about creating a service for this built on top of Hubot. The core idea is that you would go to a website and configure your profile. When you get a new Mac, you would just ssh install your profile, go way, come back and your Mac would be setup (Similar to GitHub's new employee setup).

I didn't do much research into whether or not anyone would pay for the service or how many users they might be. But it sounds like this is a stab at helping individual users set up something personal.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#52

Post by michielvoo » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 8:03 PM UTC

wasd wrote: post #3

Anybody have any suggestions on how to do this on a Windows PC? I like Ninite[1] a lot but I would prefer something more customizable. [1]: https://ninite.com/

Windows Management Framework 5.0 Preview [1] contains early versions of Microsoft's OneGet and PowerShellGet.

OneGet can install applications from repositories, using any number of providers. The preview version comes with a version of Chocolatey [2] built in managed code (C#) instead of PowerShell, but it supports the same Chocolatey gallery (a repository of software packages) and protocol.

PowerShellGet [3] can install PowerShell modules (e.g. make new Cmdlets available on the PowerShell command line). The modules can be delivered as scripts or as compiled .NET assemblies. By default PowerShellGet is configured to use a (closed preview) repository [4], which makes it not very usable, but it's interesting to know what direction it is headed.

As a more practical alternative to PowerShellGet, have a look at PSGet [4], a PowerShell module for installing PowerShell modules, with its own dedicated repository. Hopefully Microsoft's PowerShellGet will support PSGet as a provider in the future as well, the names are certainly confusing.

Desired State Configuration (DSC) [6] is a new (Windows 8.1) capability to configure Windows using a declarative syntax extension of PowerShell v4. It can set registry keys, create files and directories, enable Windows Features, and more. DSC 'resources' are PowerShell modules, so DSC's capabilities can be extended, see this GitHub repository [5] for examples.

Alternatively, have a look at Boxstarter [7]. It can do installation and configuration, and you can host your 'starter script' online and launch it with a single command. Boxstarter will take care of all Windows restarts that might be necessary along the way.

[1]: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=4407...

[2]: https://chocolatey.org/

[3]: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2014/05/20/settin...

[4]: https://msconfiggallery.cloudapp.net/

[5]: http://psget.net/

[6]: https://github.com/powershellorg/dsc

[7]: http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2013/08/30/i...

[8]: http://boxstarter.org/

Be aware that, although most modern package solutions for Windows are using NuGet as a packaging format, using NuGet.exe directly (the application) and with nuget.org (the website) is meant for managing software development dependencies, not installing/updating end-user applications or command-line utilities.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#53

Post by matthewmueller » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 8:04 PM UTC

ccbean wrote: post #40

After installing Mackup, the Mac backup tool mentioned in this guide, I noticed that it backed up my entire ~/.ssh directory to Dropbox. This included my id_rsa private key, which I would prefer not to have on Dropbox, even with a key passphrase.

Yep, it's meant for backup and restoring. I'm hoping that in future builds of Mackup you will be able to configure what you backup.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#54

Post by no_future » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 8:04 PM UTC

So basically this is just a guide on how to use Homebrew? I see nothing time-saving or "hacker" about this.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#55

Post by function_seven » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 8:06 PM UTC

swah wrote: post #46

Do any of you use Dock replacements? I'm faster with the Windows-style taskbar and uBar ( http://brawersoftware.com/products/ubar ) was the sponsor of the last episode of John Gruber's podcast.

Assuming you have uBar installed, is there anything about it that makes it feel like an add-on? Or does it feel like it's really a part of the desktop environment? (I'm not talking about design aesthetic or anything like that, just wondering if it gets wonky sometimes)

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#56

Post by jongalloway2 » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 8:06 PM UTC

sprout-wrap works pretty well for me: https://github.com/pivotal-sprout/sprout-wrap

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#57

Post by RexRollman » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 8:07 PM UTC

616c wrote: post #42

I do not wants to flame, but is there a reason people dislike Macports so much. I tried Homebrew when it was 1-2 years old, but stuck with ports bc it was so stable, compiles from source, and I never heard a serious problem. I heard the opposite complaint on the net, but almost all Macports hate was from many years before. I am the only one who chose not to rely on Homebrew!?

I am absolutely no kind of programmer but I prefer to compile from source on my own, when I can. For example, the first thing I did yesterday after clean installing Yosemite Beta 4 was to compile Scrypt.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#58

Post by madvoid » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 8:09 PM UTC

616c wrote: post #42

I do not wants to flame, but is there a reason people dislike Macports so much. I tried Homebrew when it was 1-2 years old, but stuck with ports bc it was so stable, compiles from source, and I never heard a serious problem. I heard the opposite complaint on the net, but almost all Macports hate was from many years before. I am the only one who chose not to rely on Homebrew!?

Nope, I'm a Macports guy as well, never had any serious problems with it. I wish it was possible to run both though because there are packages exclusive to either that I would like to run.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#59

Post by RexRollman » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 8:09 PM UTC

untog wrote: post #22

reubenmorais wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't, just run xcode-select --install And it'll prompt you to install the command line tools.

and, in my experience, fail every time you try to do it.

I just did this yesterday. Easy peasy.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#60

Post by jobu » Thu, Oct 02, 2014, 8:12 PM UTC

astrange wrote: post #30

This "cool hacker settings for your Mac" script turns off your laptop's power saving features (sleep, display dimming, hibernation even though sleep was off(?)), removes at least three kinds of backups for data loss (MobileTimeMachine, Resume, hibernation file), and changes AppKit settings in a way your customers will never be using (by turning off Automatic Termination, which is pretty harmless). Please don't run sc…

That's a little hyperbolic. Sure, that script stops your Mac from automatically going to sleep, but it's not like it changes the CPU usage or power usage (and it will still sleep when you close the lid).

Most of the settings in that script appear to be disabling automatic or "smart" things that average users don't want to think about and power users want done a specific way (e.g. backups, screenshots). Basically if you read that script and don't understand what it's doing then you shouldn't be running it.