Ansible playbook to provision your academic desktop

At present this playbook supports only Ubuntu. Please help me extend support to other Debian and Linux flavours by contributing issues or pull requests.

Start by flashing Ubuntu Server 24.04.4 Live ISO image to a USB stick (for example, using balenaEtcher) and use the installer to install the default Ubuntu Server OS on your computer (setup the disk however you like).

• https://releases.ubuntu.com/22.04
• https://releases.ubuntu.com/22.04/ubuntu-22.04.4-live-server-amd64.iso
• https://etcher.balena.io

Why zhutop? The reason is not very creative, it is simply a portmanteau of the name of my academic advisor (whose desktop was the first host configured using this playbook), and desktop.

Links and notes

• https://blog.local-optimum.net/getting-started-with-autoinstall-on-ubuntu-desktop-24-04-lts-147a1defb2de
• https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/spec-apt-deb822-sources-by-default/29333/7
• https://codeberg.org/D10f/ansible-desktop

Working with roles (git submodules)

Update all the roles from their respective remotes:

$ git submodule foreach git fetch
$ git submodule foreach git pull origin main

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/1032863

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10906554/how-do-i-revert-my-changes-to-a-git-submodule