Introduction

The machines in the labs can sometimes be quite difficult to work especially with broken a gcc complier, and no package manager. This scripts sets up homebrew as your package manager, installs a working gcc-11, and a nice shell environment.

Installation

bash <(curl -fsSl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CP-STA/sta-setup/master/setup.sh)

And then restart your shell for it to take effect.

Brew only installation

This script can also be used just to install brew without zsh.

bash <(curl -fsSl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CP-STA/sta-setup/master/setup.sh) -B

Restart your shell for the changes to take effect.

Features

1. linuxbrew, with which you can install up-to-date packages without asking admins.
2. A working and up-to-date gcc complier.
3. zsh: nicer experience than bash overall.
4. Syntax highting in shell.
5. Autocompletion in shell: it remembers your recent commands and autocompletes the shell command.
6. git stats: ti shows you which branch you are on in the command prompt, changes, untracked files, upstream and local difference, etc.

What it looks like after installation

Troubleshooting

1. Build failure with brew install.

   The make complier on the lab machines is a bit broken. We haven't found a way to fix it yet, but you can workaround many build failures with brew install --force-bottle to use a "bottle" (pre-complied binary). Homebrew defaults to building from source because it is not installed in /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew (for which you don't have write permission).

2. The system default package are still being called in shell after installing a different version in homebrew

   try to do

   $ brew link <package>

   and restart your shell session.

   You also need to make sure that ~/.linuxbrew/bin is in PATH (which should be if the setup is successful).

3. Problem with PATH.

   Try to add the PATH you need into ~/.profile, which will get loaded.

Uninstallation

Just remove ~/.linuxbrew. It will also remove every packages you installed with homebrew.

You should also removed the line in ~/.bashrc that reads /home/aa001/.linuxbrew/bin/zsh where aa001 is your username.

You can also remove ~/.zshrc and ~/.p10k.zsh though not removing them won't have much effect.

Customization

The theme used is powerlevel10k, applied on oh-my-zsh. the font for p10k is chosen for the compatibility. If you want to customize the prompt look, run p10k configure.

You can also read more about the two packages to learn more about what they can do.