Not to be confused with us setting Linux servers up this way but I wanted to also show off the choice and flexibility that we have within the Linux desktop.
I have been using a Linux Desktop for almost a year now and I have it configured just the way I want from a look and feel perspective. Using our Ubuntu VM on Virtual Box we can run through some of the customisations I have made to my daily driver.
First up I want to dig into dotfiles, I have said on a previous day that Linux is made up of configuration files. These dotfiles are configuration files for your Linux system and applications.
I will also add that dotfiles are not just used to customise and make your desktop look pretty, there are also dotfile changes and configurations that will help you with productivity.
So far we have been using bash as our shell which means you will have a .bashrc and .bash_profile in our home folder. You can see below a few dotfiles we have on our system.
We are going to be changing our shell, so we will later be seeing a new `.zshrc` configuration dotfile.
But now you know if we refer to dotfiles you know they are configuration files. We can use them to add aliases to our command prompt as well as paths to different locations. Some people publish their dotfiles so they are publicly available. You will find mine here on my GitHub [MichaelCade/dotfiles](https://github.com/MichaelCade/dotfiles) here you will find my custom `.zshrc` file, my terminal of choice is terminator which also has some configuration files in the folder and then also some background options.
As I mentioned throughout our interactions so far we have been using a bash shell the default shell with Ubuntu. ZSH is very similar but it does have some benefits over bash.
Zsh has features like interactive Tab completion, automated file searching, regex integration, advanced shorthand for defining command scope, and a rich theme engine.
We can use our `apt` package manager to get zsh installed on our system. Let's go ahead and run `sudo apt install zsh` from our bash terminal. I am going to do this from within the VM console vs being connected over SSH.
Now we want to make zsh our default shell every time we open our terminal, we can do this by running the following command to change our shell `chsh -s $(which zsh)` we then need to log out and back in again for the changes to take place.
When you log back and open a terminal it should look something like this. We can also confirm our shell has now been changed over by running `which $SHELL`
I generally perform this step on each Ubuntu desktop I spin up and find in general without going any further that the zsh shell is a little faster than bash.
OhMyZSH is a free and open source framework for managing your zsh configuration. There are lots of plugins, themes and other things that just make interacting with the zsh shell a lot nicer.
You can find out more about [ohmyzsh](https://ohmyz.sh/)
Let's get Oh My ZSH installed, we have a few options with `curl``wget` or `fetch` we have the first two available on our system but I will lead with `curl`
Now we can move on to start putting a theme in for our experience, there are well over 100 bundled with Oh My ZSH but my go-to for all of my applications and everything is the Dracula theme.
This site is the only theme I am using at the moment. Looks clear, and clean and everything looks great. [Dracula Theme](https://draculatheme.com/) It also has you covered when you have lots of other programs you use on your machine.
Follow the instructions listed to install either manually or using git. Then you will need to finally edit your `.zshrc` configuration file as per below.
If you made it this far, then we have now finished our Linux section of the #90DaysOfDevOps. Once again I am open to feedback and additions to resources here.
I also thought on this it was easier to show you a lot of the steps through video vs writing them down here, what do you think about this? I do have a goal to work back through these days and where possible create video walkthroughs to add in and better maybe explain and show some of the things we have covered. What do you think?
Tomorrow we start our 7 days of diving into Networking, we will be looking to give ourselves the foundational knowledge and understanding of Networking around DevOps.
