Speaker
Description
This presentation will demonstrate an Ansible playbook that fulfils many day-to-day computing needs of a researcher, and which can be easily extended. This conference will mark the first public release of this playbook, which I developed and used during the course of my own PhD.
Starting from a server image of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy) the playbook installs and configures the i3 tiling window manager, the rofi launcher, lots of software packages and various productivity-boosting customizations. Most of its components (so-called "roles") can be easily adapted to other Debian-based desktop environments.
This playbook is an example of small-scale infrastructure as code (IaC), or should perhaps more aptly be termed configuration as code (CaC), and is meant to be managed by the researcher himself or herself, who should always have the freedom to run software of their choice configured as they prefer.
