Documenting my personalization on linux

I will share with you the approach of one project that I’m working on several months ago. The projects is aimed to document the personalization of my linux environment that took (and takes) me a great amount of hours. The feel of owning the system is essential for feeling good working, coding, or just enjoing browsing.

Common problems are because I’m a little bit of distro-hopping user. I like to change/tests new distros and that makes me lost some configuration and .files on the process.

So the goals are:

1. Control, on changes and versions made
2. Document, how it is configured/personalized
3. Automate, the configuration and tools easily

How I’m dealing with this?

I followed the approach on splitting the problem in thouse 3 main issues:

Control

The best way on controlling the project is to use a repository on git, this is far known and it will help to create branches for “distro dependency”.

Also “versioning” makes a lot of sense when developing changes on “dotfiles”.

Document

The use of literate programming with org-mode is how I solved the problem on having a consistent documentation.

Automate

Using literate programing I can automate some configuration dot files to create, copy, modify the configuration files once the code-block is executed by the user allowing user to execute as wish the code blocks.

The project and some final conclusions

Finally the project is under review in a private repository at this moment I don’t see it completed to be shared with you, but I will explain here the main sections: