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Initial Silverblue Device and Blogging Setup

Posted on 2 mins read

It’s April and I’ve started my Silverblue journey. I picked a laptop to start as that allows me to chill on the couch and think about how I want to handle the setup. I will be using Ansible to do my installation of Flatpaks and my Toolbox setups.

The laptop that I’m using is an Asus Vivobook with a 12th Gen Intel i3-1220p and 12GB of RAM. Silverblue was installed flawlessly and has been working as expected. I haven’t noticed any strange behavior or negatives with the newer hardware. After getting Silverblue installed, I wanted to write this post and I had to set up my first toolbox. I’m going to use the default toolbox for my blogging activities. Let me take you through the setup.

The first step is to create a toolbox.

toolbox create

Then we can enter the new toolbox. Once you enter a toolbox your prompt should change to username@toolbox $. That is a nice feature.

toolbox enter

The toolbox is just an OCI container that has full access to your home directory. It feels seamless for the most part minus a few hiccups that I will cover in a future post. Now that we are in the toolbox, we can use dnf to install Hugo.

sudo dnf install hugo -y

Once that’s finished you can run hugo version to see the version installed.

$ hugo version
hugo v0.98.0+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=unknown

I want to further illustrate that it’s an isolated container, so let’s exit the toolbox and type hugo version again. Notice that your prompt changed.

$ exit
$ hugo version
bash: hugo: command not found

However, we can run hugo from Silverblue using the container with the toolbox run command.

$ toolbox run hugo version
hugo v0.98.0+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=unknown

Wrapping Up

This was a quick post on getting started with a few of the new tools and experiences that I’ve had to learn to move into this immutable OS world. It’s an interesting approach that I’m excited to learn how to push it to its limits. I’m also making a good attempt at using Ansible to finally get the initial bootstrap of my machines so I can get up and running faster. Please keep stopping by as I dig further.

Thanks for reading,

Jamie

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