configs

This repository contains various configuration files and scripts.

Ubuntu Installation

Partitioning

See e.g. Ubuntu Wiki.

By default Ubuntu with LVM and encryption creates following partitions:

LVM VG vgubuntu, LV root as ext 4
LVM VG vgubuntu, LV swap_1 as swap
partition #1 of /dev/nvme0n1 as ESP

The swap partition is by default only ~1G. In order to resize the root logical volume and increase swap do the following:

1. Install Ubuntu with LVM and encryption
2. Restart to 'Try Ubuntu', i.e. 'Live CD' so that root is not actively used
3. Run the increase_swap.sh script that moves 40G space from root to swap
4. Reboot to installed Ubuntu and continue the setup

Upgrades

Ubuntu release upgrades can be done using the do-release-upgrade utility from the update-manager-core package.

One can verify that it's installed from the output of

dpkg -s update-manager-core

As a prerequisite make sure the system is up to date:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt autoremove

And finally, run the release upgrade with

sudo do-release-upgrade

or to upgrade from the latest supported release to the development release, run:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

Note that new LTS versions become available with release xx.04.1, as explained here.

Config Installation

There is an installation make target that links config files to dedicated locations.

WARN: Note that original files will be overwritten!

make config

Manual configurations

Alacritty terminal

First check whether the system runs Wayland - e.g., by looking at XDG_SESSION_TYPE.

Wayland

There is a Gnome extension alacritty-toggle, which enables toggling the visibility of the terminal window.

This extension can be installed with make alacritty-toggle which clones the repository and configures the toggle button to F1.

Unfortunately, the extension is picked up only after restarting current Gnome session so one must logout, log back in and re-run the make target.

Making CapsLock an extra Esc

1. Make sure GNOME Tweaks is installed
2. Follow these instructions

Powerlevel10k

This configuration is actually stored as .config/zsh/p10k.zsh and automatically symlinked to $POWERLEVEL9K_CONFIG_FILE.

It is important to note that $POWERLEVEL9K_CONFIG_FILE is set in .zshrc and uses $XDG_CONFIG_HOME. Additionally, .zshrc disables the p10k configure configuration wizard.

Therefore, if one deliberately wants to run it, the wizard must be re-enabled with

POWERLEVEL9K_DISABLE_CONFIGURATION_WIZARD=false p10k configure

Also the XDG specification, respectively $POWERLEVEL9K_CONFIG_FILE, should be respected if p10k.zsh ought to be rewritten by the wizard.

Generally, there are two setups which, according to the p10k documentation, respect terminal's color palette (and hence Base16):

• Lean prompt style with 8 colors
• Rainbow prompt style which currently does not offer an option to select between 8 and 256 colors (empirically 256)

Some settings used in p10k configure when p10k.zsh was originally created include:

1. Prompt Style: Rainbow or Lean
2. Character Set: Unicode
3. Prompt Separators: Slanted (only relevant to Rainbow)
4. Prompt Heads: Slanted (only relevant to Rainbow)
5. Prompt Tails: Flat (only relevant to Rainbow)
6. Prompt Colors: 256 colors (only relevant to Lean)
7. Show current time?: 24-hour format
8. Prompt Height: Two lines
9. Prompt Connection: Disconnected
10. Prompt Frame: No frame
11. Prompt Spacing: Sparse
12. Icons: Many icons
13. Prompt Flow: Concise
14. Enable Transient Prompt?: No
15. Instant Prompt Mode: Off

Additionally one can download Meslo Nerd Fonts and configure terminals as instructed. The font download is part of make fonts.

Base16 colors

Base16 Shell

Base16 Shell can be installed with make base16-shell. One can then manually switch themes with base16_<theme> which creates/updates a link $HOME/.config/tinted-theming/base16_shell_theme.

Note that the shell hook is already added to and liked the oh-my-zsh plugin base16-shell, so after installation with make one just needs to reload zsh and pick a theme:

omz reload
base16_gruvbox-dark-hard

The default theme is set in .zshenv to BASE16_THEME_DEFAULT=gruvbox-dark-hard.

One can also test the themes with included colortest tool.

Alacritty terminal

Note that when changing the Base16 theme one has to manually update alacritty.yml with appropriate colors from that color scheme.

Bat

Bat supports base16 color theme by default via --theme=base16 option or BAT_THEME environment variable.

Current setting is BAT_THEME=base16-256 which, according to the documentation:

is designed for base16-shell

Custom themes are supported if appropriate file exists in BAT_CONFIG_DIR/themes When new themes are downloaded and linked, one must update the cache by running:

bat cache --build

and then check the theme is available via:

bat --list-themes

Visual Studio Code

Unless the Base16 extension is properly synced, install it and follow the instructions.

Poetry

Finish Poetry setup by manually configuring auth tokens.

Semantic language support for Neovim

Nvim config automatically installs coc.nvim plugin. In order to setup language support for various languages, refer to corresponding sub-section.

Rust Analyzer

:CocInstall coc-rust-analyzer

• https://github.com/fannheyward/coc-rust-analyzer
• https://rust-analyzer.github.io/manual.html#vimneovim

Python

:CocInstall coc-pyright

• https://github.com/fannheyward/coc-pyright#install
• https://github.com/microsoft/pyright/blob/main/docs/configuration.md

Custom configurations can be found in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/coc/coc-settings.json.

Haskell

Haskell Language Server (HLS) is configured in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/coc/coc-settings.json.

The installation of HLS is done as part of ghcup installation in

make haskell

JSON

Json language extension for coc.nvim

:CocInstall coc-json

Visual Studio Code

Settings are automatically synchronized via build-in mechanism so one can just login to GitHub.

Nvidia Settings

The nvidia-settings application does not currently support XDG specification. The workaround is to set custom config path using the --config option.

.envrc defines an alias for this so when running nvidia-settings from shell it will automatically use $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nvidia-settings/nvidia-settings-rc as the config file.

However, the desktop entry (i.e. when running the app from Gnome menu) must be edited manually. One can do this by executing the following make target:

make nvidia-settings-rc-xdg-path

Saving configurations

Edits to any linked configurations is automatically propagated here (via the symlink). Then simply commit and push the changes.

coc.nvim configuration

Although the .config/coc/coc-settings.json configuration file is linked automatically, the server might not load it correctly. This issue is described in the Thoubleshooting section and can be fixed by rewriting the :CocConfig buffer.

Ubuntu Setup Notes

KVM virtualization

Resources:

• Simple installtion tutorial
• Older but comprehensive guide
• Ubuntu wiki

System valiadtion for KVM

Whether it's even possible to setup KVM on certain system or not can be checked with

kvm-ok

If the CPU supports virtualization one can install all required packages and then run following validation check

virt-host-validate

Typically one can see

• WARN for IOMMU which is handled automatically by the Makefile target. However, this step (and the kvm target in general) needs a reboot.
• Another QUEMU warning which according to StackOverflow should be fine

Minikube on KVM

Start Minikube on KVM by running

minikube start --cpus 2 --memory 2048 --vm-driver kvm2

or for larger machnines

minikube start --cpus 4 --memory 8192 --vm-driver kvm2

Note that the test-k8s make target sometimes fails due to timeout after waiting on minikube. It may also leave some resources when it does not succeed.

Troubleshooting

LTS release not found

Ubuntu LTS releases become available with release xx.04.1, as explained here.

The issue manifests when the check indicates there's new LTS release:

❯ sudo do-release-upgrade -cd
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
New release '22.04 LTS' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.

but it fails to do the release upgrade:

❯ sudo do-release-upgrade
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
There is no development version of an LTS available.
To upgrade to the latest non-LTS development release
set Prompt=normal in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades.

There are two options to solve this problem:

1. Wait for the xx.04.1 release (~ 3 months from the LTS release)
2. Upgrade to the latest development release, as proposed in the error message. This can be done by sudo do-release-upgrade -d.

Pending snap updates

With Ubuntu 22.04 a notification might appear reporting "Pending Update of Snap Store".

The issue is that neither from terminal nor from Ubuntu Software application the update works. This is because snap-store starts automatically on login.

So first kill the process (either from command line or using System Monitor), and then run

sudo snap refresh

Note: see all pending updates by running snap refresh --list.

Nvidia Drivers

Missing nvidia-smi after some updates (which was working after installation):

❯ nvidi-smi
zsh: command not found: nvidi-smi

Fixed by running following and then rebooting.

sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

Advised here and empirically might work even without restart.

Other option which might work (although one should be careful with this one) is to run dist upgrade:

sudo apt dist-upgrade

Nvidia packages are kept back

The issue with "missing" drivers is that the driver packages are "kept back" (shown in the snippet below). This is due to an incompatibility between driver libs and the kernel which apt cannot resolve on its own.

❯ sudo apt upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  libnvidia-cfg1-460 libnvidia-compute-460 [...]
  libnvidia-gl-460 libnvidia-gl-460:i386 libnvidia-ifr1-460 [...]
  nvidia-utils-460 xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-460
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 21 not upgraded.

As a consequence nvidia-smi is unable to communicate to the driver and fails (see this post).

The solution is as described above (possibly combination of both approaches). Also, reboot might be necessary for the fix to take effect.

Nvidia on Wayland

Ubuntu 22.04 (LTS) will fallback to and start with X11 on a machine with Nvidia. It's possible, however, to override this rule and run it with Wayland just fine.

Enabling Wayland requires a manual change as described here. Additionally, also modify /etc/gdm3/custom.conf as follows:

PreferredDisplayServer=wayland
WaylandEnable=true
XorgEnable=false

Note that on Ubunut, one can tell the session type from the XDG_SESSION_TYPE environment variable.

Minikube fails to start

If minikube continously fails to boot, and as a last resort, one can clean up the whole minikube by running:

minikube delete

or even more excessive cleanup which also deletes the ~/.minikube dir

minikube delete --purge

Vim-plug plugin installation

Some vim-plug plugins require the init.vim file (the config file) to be sourced again for the plugin installation to work.

:source $VIMRC
:PlugInstall

Language servers not working with coc.nvim

Some language servers managed by coc.nvim may misbehave. For instance the HLS may error on hover to display documentation and generally not check the code for errors.

There is a configuration file .config/coc/coc-settings.json that is automatically symlinked but nvim/coc may not load it. This situation can be checked by running :CocConfig and if the buffer is empty the linked file is not loaded.

The fix is simply to paste the content of coc-settings.json to the :CocConfig buffer and (re)write it.

cargo-audit installation and usage

The installation of cargo-audit might fail if installed manually and the system does not have libssl-dev installed (note that if one uses make rust-tools this should not happen).

In such case, and possibly in other situations, the advisory database might get into an invalid state.

Fortunately, according to this issue, the fix is simply to drop the database:

rm -rf $CARGO_HOME/advisory-db/

Next invocation of cargo audit will fetch it again and fix the issue.

Sdkman completions

According to zsh-sdkman's usage notes:

if you do new installations on your sdkman candidate or just play around with new versions, uninstallations or updates, don't forget to refresh the completion script files with the following command:

sdk-refresh-completion-files

Reinstall pipx for new Python

According to this issue comment once should be able to fix pipx installations as follows:

pipx reinstall-all

Alternatively, one can reinstall pipx and the tools manually (mentioned in the same issue that was referenced above):

1. Uninstall python tools: pipx uninstall-all
2. Uninstall pipx and remove $XDG_BIN_HOME/pipx and ~/.local/pipx
3. Re-install pipx and tools using make python-tools

An indication for issues with pipx might be an error log mentioning

No module named pip

Profiling tools need additional support from the system

Performance events

Some profiling tools (e.g. samply or flamegraph) require access to the performance events system.

These settings can help:

sudo sysctl kernel.perf_event_paranoid=1
sudo sysctl kernel.perf_event_mlock_kb=2048

Tracing scope

Some tools (e.g. heaptrack) need adjustment of the ptrace scope:

echo 0 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/yama/ptrace_scope

Debug symbols

Also, for Rust binaries it's necessary not to strip debug symbols from the binary. This might be the case when building/running in the --release profile. One possibility is to add a custom profile like the following one:

[profile.profiling]
inherits = "release"
debug = true