Main Idea and Purpose

I have always tried to have the perfect home setup with important and needed features for any advanced linux user (normal users can found very interesting tips), actually I have a new and even better setup, everytime more near to the perfection (very possible never reachable), but this setup includes a thousand of nice features, there's a few examples:

• Encryption of all my data
• Everything on the home of my user, nothing on the system anymore
• History (based on home-vcs) of the data that will be interesting to maintain an history
• Branches, useful to switch to another mode, this can be an older version/release of something (Elive, there), or simply another different project
• Lots of automatizations
• Easy and automatized backups
• Syncronized with other computers
• Travel anywhere and have your full home, data, and configurations, just like automations, tools, scripts, etc...
• Not need of your computer in order to work anywhere (everything always with you)

If you found that these things will be interesting for you, then continue reading...

First Setup

Note that Im explaining it just like how I have setup it for me, you are of course free to use my ideas/features or not, but remember that my scripts/tools included on this article are setup to work on that way, you must hack them at your needs, if you think that you have do something interesting on your hack useful for me, you are welcome to send me an email with your modifications/ideas. At the same way, we use there everything for the user thana, you must change this for your own setup.

The first thing to do is to have everything on a own home, independent of the rest of the system, for that, we will use a special partition for that user home data and we will crypt it with luks mode encryption, you can found howto's in google about how to do that.

Im using right now a small external hard disk (2.5") plugged on my laptop via USB, while moving all my data to my new home structure im going to work only from the laptop for now, this is a very interesting because you can travel anywhere with your small hard disk and boot any computer and having all your work environment ready to use, just like in your house.

• Create a partition of 1 gb where you will put a live mode of Elive (tool for create live usb's in the Administration's menu of applications)
• Create a partition with the rest of the disk and crypt it with cryptsetup/luks (google howto's)

The home of the user contains basically only 2 directories, Git and Data, the first one contains everything that should be traced by git, in order to have features like history and branches (so, scripts, some configurations, patches, changelogs), and the other one (Data) contains simple data (music, videos, photos, files, isos, debootstraps, backups, repositories, tmp, www, ftp, etc). After to have this structure, we will use simple links for everything in order to have it humanly organized. More details in the next section:

Date Structure

• Git/git : In this directory we will put everything that should be traced by GIT (vcs), which includes:
• Git/git/home_linked : This is a special directory, used too in Data, everything there is meant to be linked to the real user-home root directory, like: bin, .elxstrt, .gtk*, .subversion, .vim*, .bash*, .gnupg, etc
• Git/git/changelogs : Like previously explained, this directory for example is not needed to have it linked on the real home root dir, but we may want a changelog directory there traced by git.
• Git/git/etc_root : Configurations for root, more specifically for the /etc directory, because we are going to disable entirely the usage of the root user, so the main idea is that root will not have any configuration, or not needed for us, at least.
• Git/git/etc_thana : Configurations for the thana user, the purpose of this directory is not the configuration of the applications for the configurations for our SuperHome structured system, in other words, everything related to this nice way of work, instead of configurations for applications. I have for example there a file called settings which includes simple bash variables of everything, I source it from my main tools so I want a most dynamic way of work, if I change a variable there, all my tools should be adapted directly. I can have too other files on this directory for other similar purposes of more specific tools, like I say, this dir is for my way of work settings/configurations.

TODO PAGE: FIXME

• Include a TGZ with all the required files/tools:
  • /home/home_thana_creator_environment.sh